


The Bottom of the Hourglass

by misreall



Series: Stories From the Bookstore Basement, Or : Flitcraft's [1]
Category: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Tom Hiddleston Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Death, F/M, Frottage, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Hunting, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Kissing, Love, Love Confessions, Murder, Music, Neck Kissing, Oral Sex, Other Supernatural Creatures - Freeform, Pain, Revenge, Sex, Suicidal Thoughts, Vampire Bites, Witches, middle eastern mythology, vampire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:01:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 68,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22193722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misreall/pseuds/misreall
Summary: Having lost his eternal love - Eve - decades before,  Adam has continued his retreat from the world of the human zombies he despises.  Then, one night, a woman looking for a different kind of supernatural creature stumbles onto his secret lair.
Relationships: Adam (Only Lovers Left Alive)/Original Female Character(s), Adam/Eve (Only Lovers Left Alive)
Series: Stories From the Bookstore Basement, Or : Flitcraft's [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683517
Comments: 1039
Kudos: 292





	1. A Theory is an idea used to account for a situation or justify a course of action.

_The thing about the vampire was, he wasn’t especially scary._

_Usually._

_Until he got hungry._

Earl’s phone kept cutting out, as he tried to shout extra instructions to Kay. That, combined with the noise of the airport behind him and the sound of his wife shouting at him that it was fine, that Kay knew what she was doing, meant that she hardly heard a word he said.

Which was fine. He had gone over everything three times before leaving, left detailed notes and lists on his desk, the counter, the computer, and her voicemail. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been annoying, and she reminded herself - again - that he was leaving his first and favorite child in her hands, and for what would be months, so she shouldn’t blame him.

Still, it was hard to remember that when he was yelling at her about remembering to lay in salt before December when it was September and that it was on the one hundred and twenty-seven point list that she was looking at. Order salt, along with such other winners as -

Take the deposit to the bank every day, except Sunday. 

Don’t leave the coffeemaker on.

Clean the bathroom once a week

Special orders are placed Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

In other words, those things Kay and the other six employees of the store had been doing all along while Earl was mostly cocooned in his galley and invoice crammed, fire hazard of an office, placing publisher orders, updating the website and social media, and smoking. For the nearly twenty years since he’d bought the store, he’d not taken more than two or three days off, and those mostly to go to ABA events. 

Even when he’d married Solange, Kay had thought that one of the reasons he’d proposed to the professor was she was nearly as much of a workaholic as he was and disinterested in things like honeymoons and weekend getaways. 

But when she’d received a grant to study the role of local folklore in the syncretic religions of South America, Solange had dug her heels in and insisted that Earl travel with her. “I won’t let you die having never gotten farther from this ridiculous town than Milwaukee!” Her Quebecois accent grew stronger as they had fought in the science section. 

Earl had pulled himself up to his full 5’5 and glared up at his wife, his dark brown skin almost purple with how offended he was, “For you information, Green Bay is farther from here than Milwaukee and I’ve-”

She shook her head, a hand up, “No, no, going to a _so-called_ football game is not the same as traveling. You are going with me, we are going, no arguments.”

There had been many more arguments, though they had occurred while Earl had gone through the process of getting his passport, training Kay on running the elements of the store that she hadn’t learned yet, and putting aside a stack of books for the trip. A stack that was added and subtracted from constantly and would require its own luggage.

Finally, Solange managed to get Earl to say his goodbyes, grabbing his phone long enough to tell Kay that _she_ at least knew the store was in good hands. “The girl has worked for you for three years, idiot.”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t know ab-” she heard before he finally hung up.

Kay put the phone down and sat back on the chair behind the register, surveying the store. 

Flitcraft’s was the oldest bookstore in town. The oldest store, full stop, having opened two years after the university was founded. For over a hundred and fifty years the massive, three-room store, with its twisted alleys made of overstuffed, ceiling-high bookshelves, and tiny, open spaces where comfortable, sagging chairs had been dragged and abandoned to time and questionable stains, had served both town and gown with a chaotic selection, something approaching organization - at times, and customer service that ranged from pedantic and annoyed to overeager and annoying, depending on the bookseller and the time of day.

And for the next four months, it was hers.

Sipping her now tepid coffee with a grin of triumph, she got up and started the opening procedure, setting up the till, turning on the computers - one for the register and one for placing orders and receiving, though it being Sunday they wouldn’t be getting stock unless someone came in to sell books. With a flourish, she reached behind the high, display case behind the counter - which had not been used for display for at least as long as she had worked there, but rather for held books - and flipped on the lights for the main room.

The store had originally been only one storefront, but had acquired as if by attrition and sheer force of stock, the two that had been on either side of it, and had never been rewired, so each room had its own lights and switches. The west room - sciences, history, social sciences, politics, classics, and foreign language - had been a laundromat in the 70s, and still had the ugly pink and beige linoleum from that incarnation, though it was mostly hidden beneath a monstrous mix of throw rugs held down by electrical tape. Even through the musty smell of old books Kay always thought she could smell the ghosts of fabric softener past. 

The east room - Fine and Performing Arts, Architecture, Poetry, Philosophy, and Antiquarian - was the most open of the three, with an open center with a sofa, two wing-backed chairs, and an actual Tiffany lamp that was missing several panes of glass. Unlike the west room, the outside door had not been removed and turned into a window, but was still there, albeit blocked by a heavy, low display case currently featuring a run of a jazz magazine produced in Weimar Germany before the Nazis had imprisoned and later killed its Jewish editor for promoting decadent art. 

Turning on the overhead and the Tiffany, Kay frowned at the faded, probably knock off Persian rug that case rested on. Normally Earl opened the store, even on the days he took off, coming downstairs to get the lights on before Kay came in to take over, but every now and then he had left it in her hands.

Most of those times nothing was unusual. But a few times that rug had been pushed a bit, the end of it up as if something had shoved the case - which had to weigh a few hundred pounds when full. 

As if someone had come in the door, which was impossible since the lock was rusted into place and the keys for it long since lost. 

When she’d jokingly mentioned it to Earl he’d just mumbled something about her imagination. 

Even the morning the first winter she had worked at the store, when she’d found the rug disrupted and a few drops of slushy water melting onto the rug and the warped wooden floorboards, leading towards the bookcase that covered the door to that side’s basement.

“Must be ghosts, then,” Earl had laughed. “Shit, that basement was a death trap when Flitcraft himself still owned this place back in the day. Bad wiring, mold, that’s why he had that case built. To keep fools from going down there. Of course, if I don’t get some money to fix the floor in there one day that whole room is going to be in the damned basement.”

Ghosts made a sort of sense to Kay, though she had never said so to Earl, knowing he would laugh himself to death at her for believing in foolish things like ghosts. The last thing she needed was her boss, who thought of her as sensible and level-headed to know the truth. None of which had kept her from doing a few… investigations around the doors in question. 

Thus far she had learned that there were scratch marks, deep gouges actually, under the rug near both doors where it looked like someone had pushed the heavy cases.

Earl pointed out that they were clearly old scratches.

She had learned that there was air flowing from under the hidden basement door, which could be seen if one sprinkled a little flour on the floor in front of it.

Earl grabbed a handful of flour and showed her that there was air flowing everywhere in the three stores because they were old and everything was warped. Then he told her to get the damned vacuum.

She had noticed that there was every now and then a slight, low humming noise that seemed to come from the basement.

Earl had shrugged, “So? There’s wires and whatnot down there, girl. You want to go to trade school and come back and fix the electric, _for free_ , I’ll let you in the basement. Hell, I’ll bust open that door myself. Now go check in that Norton order. They shorted us last time, so they better have those critical editions of the _Fairy Queen_ for me. Semester’s already started. Stupid, just stupid.”

The store cat - an old black and grey striped monster, with fringed ears and an attitude just shy of feral who lorded over the aisles and shelves with bland cruelty - would never enter the east room and from time to time would stand just outside of the doorway, hissing and growling at it and scaring the shit out of any customers in there.

Earl had looked at Kay like she was crazy, “He’s a fucking cat.”

And there were other, unexplained things about the store as well. Things that Earl waved off as the normal peculiarities of any old business, especially one as overcrowded and dusty as his was. 

Of course, Earl had his quirks too, she thought, as she went to unlock the store and let in Genie, one of the part-timers, who normally did not work on Sunday mornings and was looking a little rough. _College_ , Kay thought to herself, though she had not been the party type even then.

While Genie went to the breakroom to make herself an Emergent C and grab a donut, Kay indulged one of those quirks. Or traditions, he would call them. Every morning, the first piece of music played was always something by Henry Purcell. 

Kay settled back in her chair and listened to the melancholy, simple song swim between the stacks and fill the high ceiling, sipping her coffee and planning. She had over four months until Earl was back. 

Those secrets were going to be uncovered.

Starting tonight.

_The thing about the zombie who worked at the bookstore was, well, she was really rather brave - for a zombie._

_Which, considering what I am, makes her rather stupid as well._

_Too bad._

“ _O solitude, my sweetest choice! / Places devoted to the night, /Remote from tumult and from noise, /How ye my restless thoughts delight! / O solitude, my sweetest choice!_...”

Adam should have been asleep, or what was sleep for his kind. 

Perhaps not sleep so much as a rehearsal for the death to come, taunting him.

The force of the sun on the earth pushing him down and down and down into that impenetrable, silken blackness, it’s weight apparent even through the layers of masonry offering him shelter from the sure and painful death it would happily offer him.

But the sound of Nancy Argenta’s glorious soprano found its way to him, even through the soundproofing he had put in his ceiling and his personal layers of exhaustion. 

The heavy grey batten hanging from the ceiling and the musty, dust-laden books and rugs, normally blocked the scents from above, but again this morning something he could _smell_ had also invaded his sleep. His muscles hurt from want of rest, burned even, like he was a zombie who had engaged in a run or used one of those bikes that went nowhere, or some other ludicrous, zombie thing. 

Two of the usual clerks were in, as was one customer who he also knew as a regular. Coffee. Fake citrus. Deodorants. Liquor sweats on someone. Expensive yet grotesque perfume, though not much of it. A sandwich wrapped in plastic, made of turkey, spinach, and a spread that was so far divorced from nature he could not tell _what_ it was. A donut covered in cinnamon. 

What was it?

Ah.

One of the clerks, the one who was more or less the default manager of the store, had changed her shampoo. Rather than the overly floral, hippie stuff she had used the last few months she had changed it to something herbal, with a matching conditioner. It was less offensive, actually, he thought. 

With a relieved sigh he rolled over, pulling the layers of felted wool blankets and shredded silk quilts over his head, to fall back asleep, or whatever it was, content to be within the quiet void again.

Kay let herself back into the store at midnight, recognizing that it was a very dramatic time to pick. But it was also perfect. The store was closed on Monday, so she wouldn’t have to get up in the morning and it gave her time to poke around, on the one night of the week when most of the bars and clubs that catered to the university were closed so the neighborhood would be quiet. She would even try out her EVP recorder - which she had just gotten but was certain she knew how to use, and figure out where to set up some cameras.

When she could afford cameras.

She could get in a lot of groundwork and be out by dawn and get rested up before coming back to open on Tuesday.

Over five hours later, dusty, tired, and disgruntled, Kay dropped onto one of the chairs in the East room, wishing she had some chips or a pizza, having learned that the bookcases allowed for no good video angles for either door, and that an angry cat sounds fucking terrifying through an EVP recorder, even if you know that’s what you are listening to.

Even more unsettling was that the EVP had picked up nothing else. Nothing. Even if there was no spirit activity in a place it was Kay’s understanding that there should at least me some sounds picked up. Ambient noises that were undetectable normally, or sounds that it would catch at a distance, possibly resolving into pareidolia. Even the cheap one she had, with terrible levels of sound compression, should have at least gotten something other than Cobweb’s garbled yowls.

Trying to remind herself that this was a marathon and not a sprint, Kay pulled her journal and a pen from her supply bag and started taking notes, adding, at the end, “Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit, Moliere.”

There were few things in life, Kay found, that were not better said by another person who had died long before she had been born.

Having resolved to buy herself breakfast, even though she probably shouldn’t spend the money, she had just finished packing up and shrugging into the sweater she left behind the counter, when there was a heavy, scraping sound from the east room.

She had to put a hand over her own mouth to keep from screaming, and quietly and quickly she skirted displays and shelves, phone out, ready for video of… of… anything, everything! - she was in the room when the heavy, scraping started again.

A tall, dark shape had manifested itself near the sealed entrance to the storefront, steamrolling around what in a person would be its shoulders. It turned with inhuman speed, quicker than her eye could track - Kay prayed her phone was faster. This was it! 

Proof!

Of something!

The entity frowned at her in irritated fury.

She dropped her hand, frowning back, though less in anger than confusion.

The entity/book appraiser crossed his arms, “Why the hell are you here on a Monday?”

“But you’re the… you’re the _Antiquarian_ guy…. Why are you here at all?”


	2. The Antiquarian Guy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little recent history.

_He had a face._

_Of course, he had a face. I knew that he had a face before. I mean, I’d never seen much of his face but I knew it was there._

_With the light from the streetlamp behind him, and the darkness of the room I still couldn’t get a very good look at him. Even the image on my phone was weirdly blurry._

_Then he got closer and I could see him much too well._

_Some winter before_ …

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” 

Bianca clattered and skittered in her impractical shoes towards Kay, who was sitting on the cold floor with the majority of the astrophysics selection of the store on her lap and surrounding her in the narrow aisle between the physical and formal sciences. Two drunken grad students had come in earlier and ‘fixed’ how they were organized based on how they judged the worth of the authors. While part of her sympathized with the concept of merit-based merchandising, it didn’t change the fact that the alphabet was both their friend and master, and thus should be treated with respect.

“The Antiquarian guy is here,” Bianca announced with a nervous smile. She was Earl’s niece and worked at the store between acting gigs. Though she was nice enough, her shelving left something to be desired in Kay’s opinion. 

Also, she read internet poetry and quoted it regularly. 

“He’s probably here about that Vulgate bible and maybe the Incunabula of sermons, although I think that’s in such bad shape th-”

Bianca cut her off, which Kay hated, though she was willing to excuse it since the Antiquarian guy made most of the staff nervous. Or horny. Both in Bianca’s case. 

“ _The Antiquarian guy is here_ , and Earl isn’t. He went out to grab a slice and he isn’t back yet.” She used the special, emphatic emphasis that she’d used last summer when playing the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Kay hadn’t been impressed then and was no more so now.

“So? He’s only down the block, it-”

Again, Bianca cut her off and making Kay grind her molars, talking more quickly, “The Antiquarian guy is here, and Earl isn’t, and Nolan is _talking_ to him.”

“Well, shit,” Kay muttered, gently setting James Condon and Carlo Rovelli aside, standing up and straightening her skirt, slipping back on her saddle shoes, and making sure her ponytail was neat. 

Nolan was one of their regulars, who was either a construction worker or a professor of Ethics, no one knew which. He read vintage noir and modern police procedurals by the bagful, selling them back for credit, and was perfectly lovely, except when he was drunk. Then he would come in, talk a mile a minute, some of it in French, call whoever he was talking to ‘pigbelly’. Then he would be banished from the store until Earl decided to forgive him.

“Is he drunk?” she asked, as Bianca followed her to the main room. 

Ahead she could hear Nolan’s fast, slurring voice.

“And then, and then, and then, pigbelly, then she said, ‘ _Personne n'aime un pécheur, mon garçon_.’ What do you think of that?” 

Kay sighed. The stress of the end of the semester was hard on everyone.

Nolan was leaning on the counter, probably to keep from sliding to the floor, wagging a finger upwards at the victim of his latest monologue - though not rudely, but loosely, making a point in general rather than emphatically. 

Even from behind, Kay could tell the Earl’s Antiquarian guy was irked. The tall, lean man’s shoulders were clearly tight even through the heavy, old, grey wool coat he wore. His long legs were close together, and his crazy hair was only partially hidden under a black knit cap.

From the back, he looked like an irritable, anthropomorphized, exclamation point. “ _Personne n'aime un saint non plus_ ,” she heard him mutter back, his deep, whispery voice almost lost in the swath of silk that wrapped around his neck and mouth.

Bianca made a little keening noise.

“Nolan…” Kay said in her best warning voice.

“Pigbelly!” he said, happy to see her. 

“Out,” she flicked a finger towards the door. “Earl’s going to be back soon, so if you leave now he’ll never know you were here.”

For a second he looked like he wanted to argue, but then she put her hands on her hips. With a sigh, he picked up his backpack and left, head down, walking into the snow.

“Sorry, about him,” she said, walking behind the counter. Wanting the expanse of wood and glass between her and the Antiquarian guy. She may have been one of the staff members who he made nervous, though it offended her sense of professionalism. This was her house, so to speak, and she would not be intimidated. “Earl should be back shortly. Can I get you some coffee, or tea?”

Normally he would come in and Earl would be waiting to usher him straight to the back room where he did book repairs and kept the safe, so she’d never had to say more than hello and goodbye. The only things she knew about the Antiquarian guy were that he was English, infallible when it came to provenance, hated small talk, was the only non-employee allowed behind the counter where they kept an entire bookcase just for his special orders, and Earl had known him forever.

Oh, and he never paid for anything, nor did he seem to be remunerated for his work. After finishing an appraisal he would fill the old attache case he always carried with whatever he might want before leaving. A 1960s illustrated version of the Kalevala in Finnish, the entire collection of the Dublin Murder Squad mysteries, a special holiday issue of _Leg Show_ from the mid-90s, _Electric Arches_ by Ewing, random volumes of collections of folksongs, musty paperback romances in Urdu, _Sounder_ , _A Life Full of Holes_ , Bleak House, a two-volume biography of Hank Williams that was privately published and never distributed, _Confederacy of Dunces_ , _Theory & Design of Loudspeaker Enclosures _, and a guide to hydroponics, were just the ones Kay could remember.

Not that she was paying special attention, but over the years she’d developed a good memory for putting faces to books.

Or in the Antiquarian guy’s case, sunglasses to books.

Like most of the oddballs who bookstore owners collected, the Antiquarian guy had some quirks. He only came in at night. He hardly spoke to anyone. He wore leather pants and velvet shirts like a decadent rockstar. And the lower part of his face was always covered. When it was warm outside he wore a medical mask. When the temperature dropped he would swath himself in black silk or cashmere scarves. 

Over the cloth-covered prow of his nose, he wore sunglasses. Kay assumed he took them off in the backroom when examining the books. She assumed. She was never allowed back to see his process, even though she had hinted to Earl any number of times she would love to see do an appraisal.

Earl had snorted, “Sure. We’ll sell tickets. Watch a man turn the pages of a book! Whooo! The man does _not want_ an audience. Look at how he dresses.”

No matter how hot it was out, he was always covered in either a coat or a leather jacket and driving gloves. 

Only his black, scarecrow hair and pale forehead were ever visible.

Despite this, several of the staff members were a little … fixated on him.

“C’mon, Kay,” Genie had said after he had left the store one night with a German edition of Bonhoeffer’s _Letters from Prison_ under his arm, bumping her shoulder to Kay’s, “so tall, dark, and that voice? Like he’s just going to make you do the most terrible things? Tell me he doesn’t set off some vibes in you?”

She had shaken her head, confused, “Why would those be good things? While he does have interesting taste, and is clearly quite knowledgeable, there is a decidedly sinister quality to him. Or he’s just another lost soul.”

Genie nodded eagerly, her eyes big, “Yeah, that’s the point. Hot, right?”

Kay frowned.

Marco rolled his eyes, “Forget it, G, let’s see if we can figure out where he’s going. Kay is looking for Prince Charming, not the Prince of Darkness,” he added as they left the store, stalking the Antiquarian guy. Not that they would be able to follow him, they never had in the past.

“I’m not looking for anyone,” she had called out softly after they were gone.

“I don’t drink … coffee,” he said, looking to the door as if willing Earl to show up. “But thank you,” he added as an afterthought, stepping away to look at a shelf of new arrivals.

His voice was muffled by his muffler, Kay thought, amusing herself. She laughed a little.

“Is something amusing?” he asked, not looking at her, sounding put out and bored at the same time.

Kay felt hot pins of sweat break out on her back, hating having to explain anything, and hating the concept of small talk. Talk should be large or not at all. “Um, I was thinking your muffler is working. On your voice. It’s … er … muffling it.”

He turned his hidden face towards her, “It was first used in the sense of covering, later it was also _obturare_. To stop up. So yes, I am muffled.”

Then he went back to browsing until Earl came in, carrying a clam-shell container of pizza and a bad attitude because of the wait at Mancini’s and hustled him into the back.

It was the longest conversation Kay had ever had with the Antiquarian guy. 

Before.

_She was prim and prickly and walked with a slight bobble, though in perfectly straight lines, and dressed like a virgin in a Wes Anderson movie. A director whose work I cannot abide._

_Other than Rushmore. And maybe the Gene Hackman character in The Royal Tenenbaums._

_Yet, Earl trusted her and swore that she knew intuitively where every book in the store was, and she could actually sense when something was misshelved._

_I had watched her and the other clerks waiting on the customers often enough to recognize she was the best of an iffy lot, even if Earl liked her a great deal. He certainly liked her more than his niece_.

_Apparently she also believed in ghosts._

_Zombies are ridiculous, even the best of them_.

The store was supposed to be empty. It was always empty from sevenish on Sunday night until 8:30 AM on Tuesdays. On the few occasions that Earl or someone else needed to be in the store during that time, he would always be certain to notify Adam well in advance. Days, when at all possible.

Yet here was one of the employees, bold as life and filming him on her no doubt nearly obsolescent phone - planned obsolescence being one of the most disgusting of the many assaults against the earth by the zombies infesting her. 

The store was supposed to be empty. His rooms were supposed to be peaceful, with no human scents invading, no sounds making their way through his carefully installed sound dampeners. After the sun was down far enough to not come in the windows he would be able to come up and spend time in the stacks, use the store’s internet access which was superior to his to research instruments and send messages to his lawyers and gofers and move some money around when there was no other choice than to do it himself.

“But you’re the … you’re the _Antiquarian_ guy…. Why are you here at all?” she cried out, her own outrage just as obvious as his.

For a moment Adam almost didn’t recognize her. Rather than wearing one of those prissy jumper dresses with the pixie collared blouse under it, or those stupid short pants and a little sweater set like it the fucking 60s, with her hair pulled back, she wore jeans and a sweatshirt, and her hair was loose. Even then, the jeans were pressed and the shirt looked new, as did the running shoes she wore.

“It’s her ghostbusting outfit,” he thought, mentally rolling his eyes. 

For a moment Adam thought it was fate. He had been discovered. It was done. This safe place, carefully picked to be in the middle of goddamn nowhere, but not so in the middle of nowhere that he couldn’t acquire those things he needed to get up each night and make it through to the sun without blowing his brains out. His lair, if you were dramatic, hidden from the world and those few people who knew he was still in it, was blown. 

Blown sky fucking high by a woman who seemed to enjoy ABBA, The Magnetic Fields, and Aphex Twin all on the same level and did not seem to recognize the dissonance. A woman who was the only employee at the store not bright enough to be scared of him or weird enough to want to fuck him without actually knowing what he looked like.

Or both.

Even worse, he remembered the night she’d finally broken up with her last boyfriend and had blasted Little Willy by Sweet, Beethoven’s Ninth, and Run Runaway whilst victory stomping through the store - after closing the register, settling the x-tape, taking out the garbage, vacuuming, restocking the kids’ picture books, and generally straightening up - in her little oxblood oxfords. 

She was deranged.

Of course she believed in fucking ghosts. How many times had he seen her, afternoons when then the store was quiet, picking shyly through garbage like _Ghostland,_ or _Haunted Heartland_ , or _Passing Strange_ , the last of which was at least entertaining? Then her hastily setting them down or covering them with another, hipper title, when anyone approached the counter?

Looking for one undead, unreal thing, she had stumbled across him instead, which meant the world’s sense of humour was just as shit as it always had been.

For a moment Adam embraced it, the idea that he was ruined now. That this zombie had found him out and there was nothing to do but turn around, walk outside, and wait for the sun to burn him to shadow and ash as he should have let it do years ago. Or, perhaps, go to the basement, pull out his trusty, well cared for, .38 and let Earl have to answer some uncomfortable questions and deal with his moldering skeleton in return for not looking after his interests the way he had promised, no, the way he had SWORN to, all of those years ago.

You could never trust a zombie, even the good ones.

He was resigned to finally meeting death, even if it wasn’t entirely on his own terms as he had always craved. But then-

She - Kay, her name was Catriona but she went by Kay, he remembered - cocked her head and stepped forward, and then again, and again. Not put off by him, but curious, her head cocked like an eager spaniel. 

Unbidden, he heard Eve’s voice, reading aloud from a peculiarly tiny, leatherbound copy of the First Folio under that imposter’s name.

 _Use me but as your_ **_spaniel_ ** _, spurn me, strike me, Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave, Unworthy as I am, to follow you._

Marlowe, it always came back to Marlowe, didn’t it?

Her brow crinkled, her lips grew thin, her eyes narrow, leaning a little forward as she pursued him, his back hitting the glass of the door he had just entered, making the sheet of glass making up the storefront beside it tremble. She studied him and it for that moment he was transfixed by her gaze when he should have moved away from its weight.

Like the weight of the sun.

Then, like a character in a rather silly movie, she leaned back, eyes wide, mouth open.

“You’re A. J. Clarke!”

He hadn’t heard that name since the 90s. 

Actually, he had heard it tons of times, just not to his face. 

“Everyone thinks you’re dead!” she exclaimed. “Paul, he works here, he looooves your mus-”

Fuck.

Before he had time to consider that walking out into the rising sun might still be the best idea, Adam stepped to her faster than he knew she could see, spinning her around so her body was against his, locking one of his legs around hers, and put two fingers against her carotid, pressing firmly upwards just the few seconds he knew were needed, letting her fall to the floor in a heap.

Staring down, trying to catch a breath that he no longer needed but still found himself chasing when stressed, he gathered himself and pushed open the door to the basement, the bookcase swinging out with a loud thump, then grabbed her arm, hoisting her over his shoulder, looking outside to make sure no one on the other side of the window was observing the abduction before taking her to the basement.

Bitching the whole way.


	3. I always start with characters rather than with a plot - Jim Jarmusch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam tries to not kill Kay. Kay just wants her glasses.

Chapter Three -

_ I will admit I … panicked a bit.  _

_ That name. That fucking name… _

_ What I didn’t know was that I should have kept right on panicking... _

... _ 1995 _ …

“This is Kurt Loder with an MTV News Special Report. Confidential sources at DGC Records have confirmed that famously reclusive, cult musician, producer, and songwriter A.J. Clarke has gone missing under sinister circumstances. Clarke, named checked as an influence for bands such as Nirvana and Joy Division, as well as for producing for acts as diverse as Tom Waits and The Wu-Tang Clan, was overdue with the last three tracks for his own latest album. After being unable to contact him, representatives for his label traveled to his private home studio in Red Bank, New Jersey. Reports say that the door was unlocked and the interior of was in shambles, and what, according to police that were called to the scene, appeared to be a large quantity of dried blood was found in the sound booth….”

Now…

Everything happened very fast.

Adam knew he only had ten, fifteen seconds before the woman - Kay - came around. Using the speed that he rarely needed to call on, he deposited her on his couch, after hastily pushing books, albums, and bits of electronic equipment off and wincing when he heard a leather spine crack, then ran back up, swept her fallen eyeglasses from the floor, resealed the door to both the store and then the basement, and paced back and forth in the small, open space in his lair about five times, whilst stroking his hands through his hair as he tried to calm down and  _ think.  _

What was he going to do with her? Kill her? Even if he did, and disposed of the body there was no way that Earl wouldn’t know that he was responsible, which would not only ruin one of his few remaining friendships, it would mean he had to move.

Helplessly, he looked around the massive basement and his belongings. 

He was  _ not _ moving.

God, he could have just taken this as a sign that his time was up and walked outside. Seen the sun come up one last time and gone on to  _ terra ignota _ , to the nothingness, that he had craved even more since his losing Eve. Granted, how much he would be able to enjoy it as he smelled his own flesh cooking and screaming in agony was questionable. 

As if sensing his thoughts the zombie bookseller groaned and rolled over, her face pushing into the horsehair upholstery, but didn’t wake up.

_ Fuck _ ! Had he done it wrong? It wasn’t as if he had ever actually used the move on anyone. Back when he still fed directly from the source he hadn’t needed subtleties, and it would have been useless on one of his own kind.

Despite not wanting to touch her, he reached out a gloved hand and lightly shook her shoulder. Even though the heavy leather and the thick cotton of her shirt he could feel the refinement of her clavicle and acromion. He could feel skin warmth and the rush of her blood.

How long had it been since he had touched another creature - zombie or … otherwise? More than an errant brush when in an unavoidable crowd, or his hand accidentally touching that of his connection when handing money over for his supply? More than twenty years.

“Hey,” he said, softly, leaning closer, trying to look at her head, thinking that when she dropped she might have hit it, “hey, wake up.”

She did.

With a scream.

Scrambling up and over the back of the couch away from him, which was easier because that piercing shriek so close to his ear scared the living fuck out of him and would have deafened a zombie, and did send him reeling backward. Wild eye’d, she looked around and then ran for the door. There was a little disorientation to her movements, and he wondered again if she had hit her head, or if he had cut off her blood flow for too long. 

If he had unconsciously let his touch linger where he felt the pulse of -

Adam took three steps, reaching the door first, leaning his back against it. She stopped just before she bounced off of him, and he put up his hands, making her flinch. “I’m not going to hurt you, but I can’t let you leave. Not just yet.”

She looked around, probably for a weapon. Considering the number of instruments laying around, along with broken bits of machinery and metal he was planning on fixing or repurposing, there was pretty much no end of things that could be used to hit someone over the head or even stab them with, if you were determined enough. 

With a start, Kay felt her face, and then around her person, “Where are my glasses?” 

Adam fiddled with them where they rested in his pocket but said nothing. She wasn’t that blind.

For a few seconds she was more concerned with where they were than with she was frightened of him, digging through the cushions on the couch, pushing even more debris to the side. Rather irrationally she started looking around the room, as if she had set them down somewhere.

He let her go on like that, until she became less frantic and more calculating, her eyes screwed up, taking in his bed, his monitors, the guitar stands, the rack of violins and violas, the open wardrobe nearly bursting with his clothing, and the wine glasses which, thankfully, he had cleaned just that day for the first time in ages.

“You live down here?” Then she paced over to his bank of monitors, fear clearly forgotten at the moment, leaning in and squinting myopically as she looked at the six different views of the store, as well as the front and back doors. “You live here and you spy on us? Does Earl know you live down here?” Her ladylike voice was full of maidenly outrage, straight from the 19th century. It would have been funny if he was inclined to laugh.

Adam rolled his eyes and crossed his arms. Not answering. He had resolved some time during the Enlightenment to never answer a rhetorical and/or idiotic question again. It was the same time he had resolved to never again drink blood mixed with applejack and for much the same reason.

She rolled her’s right back at him, “Of course he does. That jerk.” Taking a few unsteady steps, she lowered herself to the couch, sitting very straight, her knees primly together, “At least there isn’t one showing the bathrooms.”

“I’ve done a lot of disgusting things in my life, but I’m not a voyeur,” Adam said, frowning. 

Sweeping her hand towards the monitors, Kay said, “I beg to differ,” then dropped her head into her hands. He could see and smell sweat breaking out on her forehead and she was looking pale. “I think I’m having an aneurysm. AJ Clarke is alive, living in the basement of the store, and is surveilling us and appraising books for a living.”

“That’s for security.”

“Does Elvis live under the pharmacy? Cause my grandmother is still in love with him.” Her voice shook a little, and so did her hands.

“No, Prince lives there. Elvis moved to Dayton about four years ago.”

That got him a little laugh. Hoping to keep her calm, he slid his back down so he crouched, still against the door, with his hands dangling loosely between his thighs and spoke in his smoothest, calmest tones. “I know this has to be more than a little shocking to you. Frankly,” he lied, “Earl wanted to let you in on it, but I pay him rather a lot of money to keep his mouth shut.”

“How do you know Earl?” Then, more softly, she asked, “Do you have my glasses?”

“He had a brief career as a studio musician in Memphis in another lifetime. One of his last gigs before he quit and bought this place was on one of my records.” Then, even though she didn’t ask, he added, “ _ A Document Regarding Abandoned Factories. _ All instrumental. He played bass and piano on three tracks.” Adam ignored the second question. 

“I never heard of that one.”

“No one did,” he said, ruefully. 

“It sounds pretentious.”

“It was 1989,” he shrugged. “It was supposed to be a soundtrack for a film that never got made. I never got paid for it, now that I think of it.”

Even though he didn’t need it, it still pissed him off that that bastard Jarmusch still owed him money. 

“Why are you … why are you here?” She looked at him, her great, blue eyes seemed weak and tired without her regulation, black-framed hipster glasses. “So many people think you’re dead… Please tell me that Biggie and Tupac have made up.”

“Why is it that so many of you find it impossible to communicate without pop culture references?” He tried to keep his voice down, but the whole situation was stressing Adam badly and his fangs were scratching at his gums. He wasn’t even hungry and they were aching to burst out. 

Unconsciously he appraised her and thought,  _ the great saphenous _ , that’s where he would take her blood. High up in that juicy, lovely leg, blood that had fed their organs and now tasted of their life, rich and dark. Tasting just of her, not plastic or metal or even crystal, with the salt of her skin and maybe, hell, probably, a touch of the wet crawling down her thigh for savor.

Shit. 

He might as well have been one of the  _ others _ , thinking like that. Might as well have been back in the Thirty Years War, if he was going to be a fucking animal.

She was speaking.

“So many who? Millennials?” 

He felt his fangs go quiescent. As if there were any differences between zombies based on something as ridiculous as when they were born. Twenty years was a blink of the world’s eye. 

“Just-! Never mind. Listen,” he reached slowly into his jacket pocket and pulled out her glasses, holding them out as far as his arm could reach with moving towards her, “I am really, very, very sorry for what happened upstairs. I shouldn’t have overreacted that way, shouldn’t have touched you, shouldn’t have-”

“Knocked me out?” Hunched over, she took two little steps from the couch and reached out as far as she could in turn, snagging the arm of her spectacles with the tips of her fingers and putting them back on, adding a layer of armor to herself. Taking her prim little seat again, she now stared at his face. Probably noticing that he looked pretty good for what she thought his age was.

“Er, yes. I know this is all a bit of a shock,” he ignored the smirk she gave him, “and you probably want to talk to Earl about everything. But I need your word that you won’t tell anyone I’m here.”

For a few seconds she didn’t say anything. Adam wondered if he would have to kill her after all, find a new place to stay. Lairing was such a drag, and he didn’t want to kill anyone. Any zombies, that was. He wondered if he should offer her money. He wondered how long he should wait for her to answer.

Finally, Kay frowned, “I am going to need to talk to Earl, yes.” She nodded a little, more to herself than him. “While there is a part of me that feels I should call the police, I won’t. I should. But I won’t. For Earl’s sake. He would hate to have them and the press all over the store. He  _ hates _ the police. Except for Officer Page. She’s our beat cop,” she added, as if he might care. “Can I go now?”

Her eyes met his with no hesitation, but liars always looked you in the eye. 

They were stronger, behind the lenses, but less blue.

He should probably kill her.

Instead he stood, his back sliding on the door, “I’ll have to let you out. The door at the top of the stairs is a little … tricky.”

Unless you were preternaturally strong, he added silently to himself.

She kept a few steps between the two of them and waited for him to push it open, pretending to fiddle with the knob. The bookstore was already getting light as the sun was rising. God, he was fucking tired.

There was just a little space at the top of the stairs, and even though they both pressed as far as they could in opposite directions they ended up touching. When he’d been carrying her down the stairs his adrenaline - or whatever he had in its place since there had never been a proper medical study done of his kind - had overwhelmed his senses. 

Just the barest brush of her forearm to his hand sent wild images into his head. 

Fuck fuck fuck. He was going to have to start eating more. The austerity diet he’d had himself on for years, to keep from overtapping his source, was clearly not enough. Just outside of the doorway, she turned and put out her hand like she as a banker finalizing a loan or some other bullshit. “Please don’t come into the store any time soon.”

It would cost him to touch her hand.

At that moment, because as he had thought before, the universe was a bastard, a car drove by. 

Light from the sun bounced from it’s side mirror, through the plateglass of the store window, catching the screen of Kay’s dropped phone, and lashing out like a whip of fire to catch his wrist where his hand was extended, just about to take hers.

Like a fucking character from a shit movie, Adam reared back, clutching his burned flesh, hissing, his fangs extending from the pain.

Kay, her brain clearly one shock over the line, backed up, one step, two steps, then more and more and out of his reach on the other side of the sun line. Then she ran.

Having no other choice, Adam retreated, the door of his lair slammed against the light, the smell of his own cooked skin in his nose, trapped until dark. 

Or until the torches came.

  
  



	4. No One is Getting Any Sleep Over It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kay tries to find out more about vampires, Adam tries to sleep.

  
  


Kay ran home.

Leaning on her building, wiping and smearing her sweat fogged glasses, she remembered she had left her purse and her car at the store, which was unlocked. Standing upright, holding her chest while trying to catch her breath, she wondered if it was safe to go back. Yes, the vampire had burned his hand in the sun, which should now be flooding the store, but for all she knew he had some kind of sun-proof suit down in that pile of junk he called home and was now donning it in anticipation of following her to rip out her throat in order to keep his secret safe.

Then she reconsidered. 

There was no version of such a suit that would be cool enough for someone who dressed the way the vampire did.

“For someone who dresses the way the vampire does…” Kay said it out loud, hand loosely laying on the handle of her apartment building door. “Good morning Ms. Ramirez,” she said distractedly, opening the door for her neighbor who was a night shift manager at one of the big hotels near the campus.

“‘Morning, Kay, early for you.”

“Uh, huh,” she answered, having not really heard the other woman. 

“ _ For someone who dresses the way the vampire does _ ….” 

There was a vampire. She had met him. Many times, but now she had actually  _ met him _ met him. If there was a vampire who knew what else there was…?

She could have lived without her purse, and her car, but she felt too guilty leaving the store unlocked, so Kay steeled herself and turned to walk back. Then she turned half back towards her neighbor, reminding herself of the social contract, “Yes, I have to go to the store. Have a good day.”

“You, too, dear.”

The streets were mostly still empty, but a few people were out, errant joggers primarily. 

Considering how badly out of breath she had been from the few blocks she’d run from the store Kay decided to look at her schedule and find a place to fit in some exercise. When she was younger she had jogged a few days a week and to the best of her recollection, it was something she hadn’t hated. The newest revelation that the world had shared seemed to imply that being able to run for a sustained time was probably wise as well as healthy. 

With ghosts, it had never seemed like it would matter.

Though she remembered that the vampire had been very fast, faster than she could see, faster than she would ever be able to run. She almost walked into a man walking a dog. The dog was delighted and wagged its tail, jumping up and putting its damp paws on her jeans. “Did it rain?” she asked while giving an ear scratch. The man, who gave her an annoyed look, gestured to the puddles in the gutter and on the old, cracked sidewalks, and jerked the leash to make the dog follow.

Stopping for a coffee at Java Joan’s was both a delaying tactic and because she really needed it after being up all night - apart from the short time the vampire had knocked her out. After adding three sugars Kay remembered she had ordered a mocha. She drank it anyway. Though she knew it was impossible she could feel the heat and sugar moving through her body and she wondered if she might be in shock. 

The store looked exactly the same as it did every morning. 

The windows needed to be washed, but the service wouldn’t be there until Thursday, and it was time to change out the display in the center window - it was held for new releases. The other two were themed and would wait until it was time to put up the Halloween books. Through the door, she could see her bag. 

Kay dithered.

Dithering made her angry. Dithering was illogical and wasteful.

Inside, the store was quiet and shadowy. Rather than grabbing her bag and hightailing it, Kay turned the lock on the door behind her and headed to the deepest part of the stacks, by way of fiction. 

To another person the store, especially the middle section, might seem ominous, gloomy, and sinister. Even if they didn’t know there was a monster in the basement. The shelves in this oldest part were all slightly out of true and overly jammed, the air was thick with dust and the smells of cracking, dried out paper, must, and slightly funked leather, and with even a light step the floors creaked and so did the shelves. Some rocked a bit, and from time to time a book would fall for seemingly no reason.

Kay, despite knowing about the monster in the basement, felt safer here than anywhere else she had ever been. The stacks were her armor, the books her weapons, she felt stronger among them. Which was exactly the sort of thing she had spent most of her life training herself to not say out loud, though she had never found a way to stop _ thinking  _ them for very long….

Just past History, around the corner from Religion, crammed on a few shelves between Christianity and Folklore/Mythology, was Flitcraft’s Occult section, apart from a handful of books on haunted locations in the state, which were in Local Interest. Such as it was. 

Like many subjects in books, the occult went in and out of fashion, and with the exception of a few horror fans, some goths and metal fans, and few less predictable types of which Kay herself was one, it had been decidedly out for some time. Yet even with her own near obsession with hauntings and manifestations, in addition to some slight curiosity about non-Wicca witchcraft, she had never gone through the ‘vampire phase’.

For one thing, she’d look silly in black.

Fortunately, there were a few titles - most probably bought used by Earl years before she had started at the store - from during and after the vampire craze of the early to mid-90s. She sat in the narrow space between the shelves and sorted through them, losing hope as she went.

There was that Ramsland thing about people who lived as vampires, and the one about the disappearance of a reporter researching the lifestyle. Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally, and Montague Summers were all represented in multiple printings, of course. More fun but even less useful was an old, beat-up paperback from the 1970s collecting encounters with the undead through the ages. A big book called The Vampire Gallery looked promising but turned out to be more about how the image of the vampire had changed over time and probably belonged in Pop Culture or Lit Crit rather than Occult. And last and certainly least, almost lost behind some larger volumes, was a skinny, self-published thing that was little more than a pamphlet with a lurid purple cover, that turned out to be rather gruesome erotic poetry about a woman being devoured by her bat-like lover.

Which she seemed to be enjoying.

Frustrated as well as getting nervous again, not to mention hungry, Kay returned them to the shelves, re-alphabetizing as she went. Needing to eat was making her shake, and she dropped the Vampire Gallery and knocked a few books on astrology over as well. 

After getting something to eat she would need to go to the library, even though she was in dire need of a shower it couldn’t wait. The idea of stripping off her clothing before she knew if she could do anything to protect herself wasn’t possible. While giving the shelves one more scan on the off chance a customer had put exactly the book she needed away wrong, her phone rang, the LaLaLa song from AHS echoing in the quiet store. 

Kay didn’t recognize the number so she let it go to voicemail. Whoever it was didn’t leave a message.

It rang again.

Same number. 

She hung up on it and Googled the number, but nothing came up.

They rang again. 

It was probably her father. He never remembered to tell her when he had a new number and refused to leave voicemails. 

“Hel-”

“Do you have any idea how much noise you’re making? It’s like there are five of you up there.”

It was the vampire. 

Rancid fear sweat prickled all over her body, and she could taste bile in the back of her throat.

Kay hung up, slung her bag over her shoulder, and headed for the door. Her phone rang again, just as she touched the door. She tried to ignore it, but finally, unable to stop herself, jumping up and down in little, annoyed and frightened hops, she finally answered. “And that’s not only loud, you look like an idiot. Which you must be, coming back here.”

His deep, resonant voice was snippy and irritated. Kay was grateful for it, that nasty tone being just what she needed for her temper to overcome how scared she was.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping? Or dead?” she hissed at him. Then, “Wait, I- are you watching me?” She looked up and saw where the tiny camera was positioned above the counter. When she’d asked Earl about it, he’d said something about ‘security firm’ and ‘none of her business.’

“Of course. I hear someone tromping around up there when the store is supposed to be closed am I not going to look? I thought you’d have run all of the way to Canada by now. Or’d be collecting stakes and pitchforks and flaming fucking torches.”

He sounded exhausted.

She flipped off the camera.

The sound of his eyes rolling was deafening. 

Then he sighed, a very human sound, “Kay … Miss Tilney,” his voice was raspy and his accent was heavier, as if the weight of staying awake was bearing down on it as well, “we clearly need to talk. I hope you take it as a sign of … good faith that I didn’t try to hurt you when it would have been  _ really _ easy.” 

Kay considered. Her hands were shaking worse, her head was throbbing. “Ok, talk.”

There was silence on his end and then a grunt. “What? Oh yes, I was-”

“Did you fall  _ asleep _ ?” she asked, outraged and incredulous.

“Listen, do you know how debilitating it is for someone like me to be awake at all this late in the day? Especially when I am  _ trying  _ to heal?”

“No, I don’t,” she hated how huffy she sounded, but then he sounded huffy too. It was just that when you were a man with a gorgeous baritone and an English accent  _ huffy _ sounded  _ sexy _ , whereas she knew she most likely just sounded childish.

Which made her wonder how old he was. Was asking a vampire how old they were considered rude? 

“Alright. You need to sleep. I am probably going to fall over once my adrenaline stops bouncing like a super ball. How about we meet somewhere?”

He snorted, “No. I don’t go out in public.”

“I’m not having you over or going downstairs.”

“We could meet in the store.”

Now she snorted, “Fuck that.”

She waited. 

He waited.

Her’s was the only breathing that could be heard.

“Fine! Fine. Pick somewhere and a time.”

“Paul’s Lounge. 8:00.” She hung up before she could change her mind.

Adam scowled at the baseball hat. 

The worst hat in the history of hats, ubiquitous and beloved of the zombies, ugly, cheap, and stinking of the oil and chemicals wasted in making the thing. Managing to make everyone who wore one look shitty and bland at the same time, usually marking allegiance to some larger organization that was very happy to take money in return for the privilege of offering them free advertising, he hated even touching it, let alone putting it on.

It was one of the perfect fucking symbols of the modern, zombie world.

Adam  _ knew _ he’d had one somewhere, and sure enough he found one in the back of the mahogany armoire he used to store most of his clothing, it having been tossed in ages ago. God knew where the fucking ugly thing came from. Maybe Earl had given it to him, or he’d found it in box of albums he’d purchased at an estate sale. 

This was the stupidest idea he’d had in decades, if not a century. He broke three rubber-bands trying to pull his hair back before he finally managed it. One of them twanged out of his fingers, unerringly hitting the mostly healed burn on his wrist.

Why had he taken off his fucking gloves? After depositing the woman on his couch it had been an unconscious act, proof that even the undead suffered from being on automatic. 

Even more goddamn frustrating was wanting to know why had he taken her hand? 

In one way he was thankful for the burn. That bit of contact, the slide of her fingers across his palm, then her small palm pressed against his, the warmth of it on his skin and seeping deeper. The first skin to skin touch he’d had since … Eve.

Her voice was a phantom that he, like some Heathcliff wanna be, begged to haunt him - clear and lush and ever-smiling was his Eve’s voice.

For a moment, his eyes closed and they lay in their little bed in the Villa Lucia, moonlight silvering the room, his head on her lap as she stroked his hair and recited from memory. “ _O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do; They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair_ … _Oh,_ _Marlowe_ …”

Bending over him, her pale hair a halo, their lips had done as hands did. One of her fangs nipped his lower lip, and she’d lapped at it like a kitten….

Even worse than feeling of Kay's skin, even worse than feeling how the blood moved through the veins of her wrist - blood whose scent reminded him of bittersweet chocolate and oranges - when his fingertips brushed them was the sense flash of her. Kay. The unavoidable knowing that came from touch, one of the cursed blessings of his kind, which grew stronger with time. Forced into knowing that her toes were pinched in those new trainers, she had been born a month early, there was a scar near the small of her back, she had never-

Enough.

His eyes snapped open, and Adam yanked on his gloves, slammed the cap over his head where he could swear he felt it poisoning his mane, then fishing a pair of sunglasses from where they had fallen under his desk, idly noticing three more pairs, two paperbacks, and a cathode-ray tube he’d forgotten he even had. Even Adam knew he needed to do something about his space. At least the noisy bookseller offered him an excuse to not clean up.

Normally he wouldn’t leave the store so early, and since classes at the university had only been in for a few weeks, the streets were filled with giddy, excited, hormone-addled students and tired, bored adults bouncing from store to store to bar to bar to restaurant to restaurant. 

Phones and headphones and air buds and consuming all working to cocoon them in a safe little prison on half-assed engagement with the world. 

Overhead, the bubbly sound of a bobolink -  _ dolichonyx oryzivorus _ \- singing to his mate could barely be heard over the sound of traffic and chatter. The shirring noise of wind through a sugar maple -  _ acer saccharum _ \- that was just barely beginning to turn pinkish-red around the edges of its leaves accompanied it. 

Not, he thought, that they would get a proper turning of leaves this fall. Every year since he’d moved here Adam had seen that glory decline to a pale shadow of what it had been. Climate change, that mealymouthed way of describing the end of the world, had put paid to that yearly marvel.

The lights from the stores polluting the dark.

The cars burning oil.

The stink of diseased blood, not so common here as in other places it was true, but still more of it burning his nose every day.

It all combined to put him in a less than happy frame of mind when he reached the bar. The windows were darkened, but he could easily see through them. He’d never been in there before of course, but it was a fixture of the town since the 80s, with low old couches as well as the standard table, a vintage pinball machine that Adam could tell needed to be tuned up, an upregulation pool table, and a massive, fake tree with wide plastic leaves and twinkling fairy lights, shading the already dark room.

People loved it. It was legendary.

Of course they did. Of course it was.

Kay was seated right in the middle at a round table, nervously fiddling with a bottle of cheap beer. He watched her for a few moments, in her pixie collared blouse and her yellow cardigan, and her hollow, scared eyes behind those big, black glasses. At her elbow were several library books, and Adam couldn’t help it, he almost smiled.

When he entered she looked up, the sight of him making her straighten her spine and her sweater.

There were five other patrons at the bar, and an additional twelve all around the room. Other than the bartender there was a waitress working the floor.

He could kill them all before any of them would reach the door.

Despite everything, he really hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  
  



	5. Detente, or Scenes From Something Approximating a Friendship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam and Kay talk.

Adam took the seat across from Kay, his back to the door, which he didn’t like but there wasn’t much he could do about it unless he sat next to her, which would be awkward and, based on how hard her heart was beating, might cause her to pass out from stress. He didn’t feel that all that different, stresswise. Being in public, around zombies, around their smells and their blood and their noise, and there was always the possibility someone would recognize him.

They stared at each other for a full minute. The waitress dropped another beer for Kay, breaking the tension, “Do you want anything?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. Then, when she had walked away, he added in a low, portentous voice, “I don’t drink… beer…”

Kay slammed her hand on the stack of books, “Stop doing that!”

“Sorry, but you were tense enough to shatter.” Then he half shrugged, “ _ I  _ thought it was funny.”

“Then you don’t have a very good sense of humor, Mr. Clarke,” she said, taking a long pull of the shit lager she seemed to favor.

“Adam,” he said through gritted teeth. “Just Adam. I haven’t been… that other person for a long time now, and I don’t plan on being him again.” He looked around, paranoid and certain this was a bad idea. “Don’t say that name again.”

She put the bottle down and frowned at him. “No one here is going to recognise you. That was a long time ago.” She gestured to the ugly, blaring, and bright internet jukebox hanging on the wall, playing Post Malone. Sunflower. “I am pretty sure that no one in this place is going to be playing your greatest hits. Besides which, you look so much like you looked twenty-five years ago no one would ever think you were you. Adam.”

“You knew who I was.”

She shrugged, “I’m extremely good with faces, and I was in shock. If you’d played it off I would… well, I would still wonder what you were doing there, but I wouldn’t have believed you were you-know-who.” She whispered the last part.

She was probably right.

Adam hated that. He hated himself for having outed himself not just as AJ Clarke, but as… as what he was, to this woman. “Fine,” he said, crossing his arms and not speaking. 

Kay drank a bit more beer. “Um… are… is there… um.” As she stumbled over her words, she tapped her fingers on the stack of books. “Is there... anything…”

A nicer person, which Adam hadn’t been even when he’d been a person, would have taken pity on her. Instead, he gave her a bland look. Finally, she straightened that prim little sweater, and the demure little skirt she was wearing, and put her oxford clad feet next to each other, folding her hands and asked, “Is there anything in these books that might be of use to me understanding you as we go forward?”

Frowning, he cocked his head and looked at the stack. “What makes you think I’ve read any of those? Do you read every book about nosy booksellers that comes out?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

Actually, he did, too.

_ The trees had finished turning and some of them were already losing their leaves. Adam had come into the store just before closing to look at some books that Earl had sent from Brazil. A two-volume Vulgate Bible from the 16th century that had been translated by a monk into what he thought was a phonetic version of Tupinambá, that would be useful in converting the indigenous people. He’d scoffed at the idea, “Yes, because using the Latin alphabet to make up a false version of an existing language is going to make the idea of Jesus crystal clear. Still,” he tenderly turned the pages, his fingers stroking the air just above the vellum, “at least he could be bothered to learn to speak to the people whose way of life they were about to destroy. But his work is exquisite. Look at the depth of color. That blue, I’ve never seen anything like it. Not just lapis.”  _

_ He looked up at her from over the scarf covering his nose, “You know, the Egyptians invented the concept of blue? Before them it doesn’t exist in art. If someone with your eye colour had been around previous to them there would be no word to describe it. Fuck,” he turned another page, shaking his head at the weird writing, “but God has a lot to fucking answer for.” _

_ Afterward, when the last customers had been ushered out, and Adam had finished his notes on the book he’d turned to her while pulling his leather gloves back on, “Did you bring your car tonight?” _

_ “Do you need a ride somewhere?” Behind her Genie was giving her a thumbs up. The rest of the staff had decided that there was something going on between her and Antiquarian Guy since he actually bothered to talk to her when he came in now. _

_ As if that were possible. But what could she say? “Even if I were interested in having sex with the most grumpy man on the planet he’s not interested. He’s not interested in me”  _

_ Though it had made her wonder, did he have sex? Could he even have sex? Wouldn’t there be vascular issues?  _

_ It was suddenly very hard not to look at the front of his black jeans and speculate.  _

_ “No, I have a car. I wouldn’t get into that dinosaur burning piece of shit you drive. It’s not raining for the first time in a while, and I thought if you were walking I’d walk you home.” Then he leaned closer and whispered, “You told me you wanted to learn more about me, about what I’ve seen and done. It would give us a chance to talk.”  _

_ “I’ll lock up!” Genie practically sang out, while Kay was having a little vascular trouble of her own from that whisper, which her coworker had mistaken for being romantically intimate.  _

_ Even after a month in which she hadn’t seen a hint of fang or claw, the idea of walking on a dark street alone with Adam scared her. Now, looking at him she realized that he was testing her in some way. “Sure. As soon as I’m done with the deposit.” _

_ He lifted a copy of a Tana French mystery - The Likeness. “It’ll give me a chance to read this.” _

_ The book he was holding was from her recommend shelf. Oddly flattered, Kay grabbed the cash drawers and headed to the office. _

“Are you saying you want  _ me _ to tell  _ you _ which books might give you useful information on… what I am? That’s pretty gutsy for a girl wearing a pixie collar.”

“I don’t see what bearing my clothing has on it. I like this blouse,” she said, looking down at herself with a frown. Maybe yellow hadn’t been the best choice for tonight but otherwise, she looked fine. “And since we are at a power imbalance I would rather not be at a knowledge imbalance as well. But if you don’t know anything about these-”

The vampire, grumping in silence, motioned for her to hand him the stack of books. Grabbing the one on top of the stack, he flipped pages almost more quickly than she could follow, passing his hand over each in turn. Over the years it had been a secret pleasure of hers to watch him go over the books he appraised. There was a ritual to it. Earl insisted that everyone, including himself, wear latex gloves when touching the rare books, everyone but his pet appraiser.

Kay would find things to do around the counter when he worked. She told herself that it was because she was interested in learning more about the rare book trade. 

That it was educational.

He would slowly slide off the leather gloves he wore all of the time otherwise, exposing his big, elegant hands. Those hands that seemed far too large for those long, lean arms. Then, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, as if about to do something physically taxing, he would slowly open the cover, with reverence. With care. His examinations very thorough and his fingers nimble and sensitive, as if he were learning as much by touch as he was by sight. 

Now and then, if a book was especially unusual, a small sound would escape him, causing him to stop and gently brush a fingertip over and over a spot, his eyes closing. Caressing raised lettering, or the embossed and tooled leather of the covers, or the gilding on the edges of the paper. 

It was intense. At times too intense and Kay would have to find a task elsewhere in the store, not wanting to accidentally meet his eyes. That would be too intimate.

Now in less time than it took for her to finish her Rolling Rock he had gone through all five books, carelessly shoving them away as he went. “Trash. Trash. This one has a chapter worth reading. Trash. Not even trash,” he said, as closed the last one.

“I- you-,” she leaned forward, whispering furiously, “are you telling me you just read all five of those books.”

“Yes. It was like upending a used litter box into my brain, but yes.”

Unsnapping her handbag, Kay pulled out her favorite Moleskine notebook - the classic with a soft cover - and a pen and added to her notes. 

Or tried to. With that same unnatural speed, he had plucked it from her hands and was rifling through it. “Hey, that’s private!”

“Not if you’re writing about me it isn’t.” He frowned at the pages, “Is this shorthand?”

“Yes. I have five brothers, so I taught it to myself so I could keep a journal and not worry about my privacy. I didn’t take vampires into account.”

“We don’t like that word,” he said distractedly as he read. Unfortunately, it looked like he could read shorthand, too.

Very little in her book was about him, but she refused to try and get the book back from him, knowing she’d fail and look stupid in the process. “What do you like to be called.”

“Adam, in my case.” He flipped pages back and forth, brow furrowed, “We all have our own names. Just like you zombies.”

“Zombies?”

He motioned to the rest of the patrons in the bar. Some were on their phones, the rest were watching a reality show with no sound. “Zombies.”

Now it was her turn to frown and cross her arms, “I am  _ not _ a zombie.”

He closed her notebook and tapped it on his palm, “Maybe not, it’s too early to say. Your taste in music is fucking terrible, still.”

She stacked the books neatly, putting the one that wasn’t entirely useless on top, folding her hands primly on the table. “While I was at the library I spent most of my time doing research into crimes in town, as well as the other ones in the area. Looking for -”

“I can guess what you were looking for,” he said, impressed despite himself. He had known she was an intelligent woman, but it took a really cool head to spend the day looking into unsolved disappearances and peculiar murders, not just folklore and fantasy, let alone to come here and confront him.

“Then you know that I didn’t find anything. At least nothing that struck me as… supernaturally suspicious. Or, er…” she hesitated.

Adam huffed and leaned back in his chair, his head tilted, “Nothing involving fully exsanguinated corpses, or cattle mutilations? It’s always the cattle mutilations that make you people think of werewolves and little green men, isn’t it? Instead of just assuming drunk teenagers or purely mortal maliciousness? But, if my word means anything to you, no, I have not killed or even drunk from anyone here, or anywhere else for that matter, in decades. Nearly a century at this point.”

He realized he was speaking at a normal volume about things that were only meant to be spoken of in whispers, but the zombie lack of curiosity had its advantages. No one could be bothered to put down their devices long enough to eavesdrop. What was the goddamned world coming to when  _ they _ weren’t even nosy any more?

At least not in person. Adam hadn’t the slightest doubt that any one of the other bar patrons could tell him all sorts of lurid and private details of the lives of the rich, famous, and banal zombie they each chose to worship like a household god of old. 

“Stop that,” Kay’s voice was snippy and annoyed.

“Stop what?”

“Sneering. You are just sneering. Anyway, yes, no strange cattle thingies.” He rolled his eyes at her and sneered harder, she frowned back at him and doubled down, “Thingies, or bodies with most or all of their blood missing. Although,” she leaned forward, “if a regular human stomach can only hold about a quarter of a gallon at a time, and a human body has over a gallon of blood, unless you, um,  _ others _ , have weird stomachs I don’t know how you would drink a whole person dry. Do you have weird stomachs?”

“How did you know how much a stomach could hold and how much blood was in a body?”

“When I was looking into the crimes I started to wonder how exactly it would work so I looked it all up. I mean, I didn’t go too deeply into it, just Google and a few books.”

Adam was impressed. 

He hated it.

“As far as I know the size of our stomachs is no different than one of yours,” he stopped himself from saying the Z word. 

She made a note.

Watching her write her little notes, Adam tried to remember the last time he’d just talked to someone. Really talked, not exchanged information and goods and services, but had a conversation? And who with? Earl, probably, when he’d first moved into the basement. Even then, his old acquaintance was even less inclined to chit chat than he was, and the dust in the basement bothered Earl’s allergies, so it had been ten years or more easily. 

Finishing her writing, she closed the book, capped her pen, and put them back in her bag. “Considering that you have been down there for such a long time, and that you have done no harm, I see no reason for anything to change going forward.”

“How magnanimous of you. What makes you think that I feel the same way? What makes you think I won’t follow you home - to 999 Williams St., apartment 4-B, which is a fucking ugly building by the way - rip open that cute little collar and sink my fangs nice and deep into you and test just how much volume my stomach can handle?”

Her mouth grew primmer and tighter, and her face paler, and her pupils much, much bigger. Adam could feel his fangs wanting to descend and it made him feel malicious, “You’re B+, aren’t you? I can smell it from here. Pretty rare and utterly delicious.”

“Stop trying to scare me.”

_ “Ugh, no, please, stop. That sounds like when someone is having an anxiety attack. In fact, it may be giving me an anxiety attack.” _

_ The vampire stopped playing, but stared down at the keyboard for a full minute before he lifted his head and scowled at her, “The harpsichord is one of the most delicate and refined instruments ever created. With the woodwork involved in the making of even the simplest one they are works of art that create art in turn. Just one simple passage,” he played the quick, spritely beginning of a piece that he had told her before was by Handel, in a way that made her believe he had known the composer personally, “also works as a time machine, taking the listener back to the more graceful and intellectually curious time that it is a symbol of.” _

_ “Sure. I’m sure it was wonderful. If you were a white male. A wealthy white male.” _

_ He rolled his eyes. Again. This time when they reached their apex he stopped for a moment, as if asking the ceiling to give him strength.  _

_ His eye rolls were an entire language unto themselves and she was just starting to understand it. “You said you wanted to know more about Baroque music, didn’t you?” _

_ “Violin or guitar please,” she said, setting back onto the couch with Neil Stephenson’s Quicksilver. Then she sat up to over the back of the sofa at him again, frowning, “How did you get that thing down here anyway.” _

_ He gave her an enigmatic look, then delicately picked a violin made with golden wood from a rack of string instruments and lifted it to nestle under his chin, raising a bow that he held gently in his spidery fingers, making a point of not answering her _ .

The arrogant jerk almost smiled at her, his eyes narrow, the tip of his tongue barely visible in his open mouth. “I’m not trying to scare you, I am scaring you.”

“Of course you are, I’m not stupid. Even if you weren’t… what you are… I’d be scared. I’d be right to be scared. You’re a man, who’s way bigger than I am, who’s fast and strong and knows where I live and where I work and I have no way of defending myself from you except, you know, by setting the store on fire and I would  _ never  _ do that.”

Abruptly he sat back, looking down and away from her, his mouth a fine line, “Shit. Fuck,” he looked up at her, “I’m sorry. That was… I didn’t even think about that part. I haven’t spent much time around people in a while and I forget… No. That does not signify. It is no excuse for my unpardonable behavior, yet I ask your pardon nonetheless,” he said, putting his right hand over his heart and bowing his head.

In those few sentences he’d gone from edgy, asshole rockstar to a courtly creature of another time. He was history captured in a tall, beautiful body. Kay was stunned. 

And even more fascinated.

“I’m sure we can find a way for you to make it up to me,” she said, signaling for her check.

The vampire looked apprehensive.

_ She’d been in his lair a few times by now and the closest he’d come to attacking her was when she told him that she liked some Fleetwood Mac. “They are my mom’s favorite band!” _

_ “Bad genetics is not an excuse for liking garbage music.” _

_ “I like Aerosmith, too. And at least a few Justin Timberlake songs…” _

_ He had pointed at the door, “Get out, or I can’t be responsible for what I do next.” _

He agreed to it. What else could he do? Kill her? Turn her? 

As he walked towards the hospital for his second appointment of the night, Adam reasoned, at least it would give him someone to play for, even if her taste in music was for shit.

_ On Tuesday nights he would walk her home when the weather was good, it had turned into a sort of ritual for them. She would stop and get a coffee and they would take the long way, so they could avoid the bars and restaurants on the strip, cutting through the park that ran along the river. Adam would pedantically tell her the names of the trees and plants. She would try and get him to tell her more about the others of his kind.  _

_ That was what he called them, ‘the others.’ _

_ Getting him to talk when it was a subject he didn’t like was about as easy as it would have been to beat him in a footrace. Kay had started running again after all, figuring that even if she couldn’t outrun one of his kind, Adam stood as proof that there were things out there that needed to be run from, and some of them might not be sprinters. _

_ Finally, one night, Adam told her about one of them, in hushed tones. A secret. He’d been in a good mood, sort of, which usually meant he’d had a drink recently, which he made a point of always keeping secret from her, but she’d learned to see the signs. The biggest of which was he would almost smile at her. _

_ Which is why she later she felt a little guilty that she stopped and yelled at him, her voice very loud in the empty park, “That is horseshit! Horse! Shit! Christopher Marlowe did not write the Shakespeare plays you elitist jerk!” _

_ His upper lips snarled back, his fangs coming out of the first time since the morning they met, and he was gone in a whirl of fallen leaves before she could finish. _

_ Anger carried her the rest of the way home, through taking off the dress she wore to work, into her pajamas, and pouring herself a glass of wine before she sat down on her couch, fretting that she might have made a very serious mistake. _

_ She called him, leaving a message. _

_ He didn’t call her back. _

_ She sent him several emails, apologizing for her tone if not for the gist of what she said. _

_ They bounced back. _

_ Finally, she drew him out the only way she knew how. Playing music. Terrible, loud music in the store. It was finally Sweet’s “Little Willie” that was the last straw. Even the sound of his calling her was angry, “Turn that shit off.” _

_ “Only if I can come down after the store closes.” _

_ “No.”  _

_ “I’m playing Gary Puckett next.” _

_ “Fine,” he growled. “But we aren’t talking about it.” Then he hung up on her. _

_ That night she sat on the couch and he played the most experimental music he had ever written for her, with extra feedback because he knew how much she hated it, and she left the book that her father had written about the origins of the anti-Stratfordian movement on his desk before she left, where it remained untouched for weeks. _


	6. Taking Steps and Then Retreating Is No Way Advance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam and Kay take a walk

“ _ It’s very late or very early, depending, which way you held the day _ ,” Kay read. 

After a moment of not registering the rest of the page she folded the book closed and thought of Adam for a while, then looked at her watch. It was a vintage, 80s, Velvet Underground swatch that she’d found in her mother’s jewelry drawer, unworn for decades. She loved it’s purple, plastic strap, and the teal and black lace face, and the utterly unnecessary, black ‘Swatch guard’ covering the face. 

Adam thought it was hideous and looked especially wrong on her. “That looks like something that a janitor swept up after a Love and Rockets concert,” he had jeered. Then shrugged, “I suppose  _ at least _ it's not clogging up a landfill somewhere.”

Flitcraft’s was open for another five minutes. 

While Earl was gone she had to close the store every day that she worked, because he didn’t trust anyone else to do the deposit. Due to that, the only two nights she wasn’t at the store lately were Monday when it was closed, and Wednesday that was her day off. 

Earl was willing to let the drawer count wait that one extra day since it was the least busy of the week, though if he’d had his way she would have gone in and done it on Wednesday after the store closed. When he’d brought it up it had been Kay’s first instinct to say yes. He’d been expecting her to agree, she could tell by the offhanded way he had asked. 

Instead she had told him that during the weeks before Christmas she would, especially since they would probably need extra change those days, but otherwise her day off was her day off. The surprised disappointment on his face had almost made her cave. 

Approval was a problem that she’d been working on.

Her phone had slid between the cushions of her little, overstuffed sofa, muffling it so she had not noticed that one of her brothers - Joel the youngest - had texted her several times about if he could get a Christmas job at the store when he came home from Columbia. So had the second youngest, Malcolm, who was at Caltech.

She sighed quite loudly and thought Adam would be proud of the ooomph she put into it. The real depth of annoyance. There was no question that their mother had put them up to it. If Kay was going to be an underachiever the very least she could offer their family was a store discount and temp jobs for her younger brothers during Christmas and summer break. 

Malcolm would be fine. He was personable and his amazing memory made him perfect for helping people trying to remember authors and titles, and his boyfriend was going back to England for the holiday so he wouldn’t be distracted.

Joel, however, took after dad… 

Retail would be torture for him. 

Kay pulled out her Moleskine and made herself a note to call Liz from her book group to see her flower shop would need extra delivery drivers during the holidays. Joel was extremely timely, and a very safe driver. It would work.

She looked at the time again. The store had been closed for ten minutes. Genie and Bianca always sped through closing on Wednesday, doing a very poor job of vacuuming, so they would probably be just about to set the alarm and walk out. Fidgeting with her phone for a few seconds, Kay waffled, turning to sit cross-legged. 

Then she called him.

“Why are you calling me?” His voice was distracted and clipped, and there was the sound of something falling in the background, followed by him softly cursing.

There were times that Adam reminded her of her father - not physically, of course - Armin Gemmill was stocky, sturdy, and as blonde as she was, not to mention uncomfortable with eye contact and prone to long monologues, given in an excited rush when a topic that he was interested in came up. 

But like Adam, he had little in the way of social niceties. In her father’s case, because he didn’t understand them. In Adam’s case because he did, and he saw no point in wasting them on zombies. 

Kay, however, did. “I was going to see if you wanted to get together, but since you are being so rude, I’ve changed my mind.” She was about to swipe to hang up when she heard a ghostly sigh that may have been the word, ‘wait.’

After counting to five, so as not to look too anxious, Kay put the phone back to her ear, “Yes?”

“I-” he stopped, then started a few times, and she could almost see him opening his mouth to speak and then slamming it closed like a cat trying to not cough something up. Which reminded her she needed to buy cat food for Cobweb before going in the next day. While she waited for him to say more than ‘I’ she wrote herself a note about it. 

“I’m sorry, I was in the middle of something,” finally rushed out of him in a babble of aristocratic awkwardness. During the few weeks of what on Kay’s side was a growing friendship she’d never seen or heard Adam sound or behave awkwardly, no matter how rude or easily annoyed he was. There was a preternatural grace to his motions and a haughtiness behind his cranky behavior.

“Then why did you answer the phone?” she asked.

The silence on the other end was irked. She was learning to understand the language of his not speaking, but he was an old crank and there was a lot to pick up on. He ignored her question, “What can I do for you?”

“It’s my night off-”

“I know,” he interrupted.

“And we haven’t done anything since a week ago Tuesday. You, er, didn’t walk me home last night.”

“As I said, I am working on something.” 

When Kay’s father was writing, or structuring a new lecture, and when her mother was deep in a formula, she had learned to never disturb them. She’d also learned to make Kraft Mac n’ Cheese and a salad for dinner for herself, and later for her brothers. 

“I am sorry to have disturbed you. Good night.” There was a slight prickling along her arms and back, caused by embarrassed adrenalin. 

“Wait! I’m due for a break. Would you like to take a walk?” He sounded disinterested.

Not liking how happy she was to have been asked, especially like that, she still said yes.

When leaving the store when it was early enough for there to be people in the street Adam went up a winding set of black metal stairs that opened into a little room only Earl knew was in the store. The entrance to it had been walled off by a bookcase containing horror novels. 

Because Earl always thought he was funny. 

One wall was taken up by a fireplace, and there was a large chair covered in a sheet, which had led Adam to believe that it had probably once been part of a larger room that had been divided off. Through it he was able to exit into the alley behind the store. 

When on what passed for a high street in the university town, Adam walked with his hands in his pockets and his head down, eschewing his usual scarf or medical mask. Kay had persuaded him that all he was doing was attracting attention to himself. “In a college town do you know how many guys look like ‘musicians’?” she said making actual scare quotes, for fuckssake. “The worst anyone is going to do is assume you are here on tour and ask where you’re playing. But with that permanent grimace of yours even that isn’t going to happen much.”

He still wore his sunglasses when there were people around, at least if he hadn’t just fed. Moonlight and hunger made it clear that the eyes of his kind were not those of a human. 

A bit of rain had come down earlier, enough to drive down the auto exhaust and freshen the air. Leaves - red and yellow and green alike, more vibrant this year than he had expected, had fallen with it, covering the cement with a lovely blanket and muffling the click of his boots. Once he was off the main road and into the residential blocks here and there Jack-o-lanterns flickered on porches and in windows. Yards were littered with fake tombstones, most of which were non-biodegradable nightmares purchased at some big box store, though a few were handmade of plywood and paint by people who could be bothered. 

He stopped to admire a massive green snake that had been constructed out of canvas and metal that was twined around a tall, narrow house. Its head rested on an upper balcony, staring at him with lazy, slit red eyes. Someone, probably several someones, had worked very hard on it. When he met up with Kay he’d ask her to take a picture of it for him during the day and email to him.

Paper-mache witches cackled on porches.

Little ghosts danced with linked hands around trees.

Cutouts of black cats skulked and slinked.

Halloween was in two weeks, and the town was dressed already.

Though appalled by the vampiric imagery, which was either campy or romantic, Adam was as fond of Halloween as he was of any zombie holiday. At least a few of them tended to show a little imagination and artistry in celebration of it. Though the year before he had seen a woman dressed in a premade costume as a sexy Reuben sandwich and had nearly been enough to make him decide to take up sunbathing.

For whatever reason, Adam was feeling mildly in the wrong about snapping at Kay, knowing that she was right, that he should not have picked up the phone. 

The last week, and for the first time in who knew how long, he’d been composing. Though it came in fits and starts, like an old car that’s owner was trying to coax it through one more year, the work  _ was _ happening. He lured it and allowed it to make him skip meals and forget everything as he played and put down the notes, many of them to only be scratched out and replaced, and then perhaps restored again. But it was happening.

For the first time since-

He had very nearly missed the meeting with his connection on Sunday night, so entrenched was he in the work. Thankfully the sight of one of the Waterford sherry glasses he used to drink from sitting still dirty on his coffee table reminded him at the last possible second. 

Yet despite this when he had seen Kay’s number come up he had answered it before he had even stopped to think about it, and then was angry at himself, which he took out on her.

Turning the corner onto her block, he saw her waiting in front of the ugly building she lived in, dressed in an old fashioned raincoat, a bright blue pair of what were once called pedal pushers, and penny loafers.

With pennies in them.

She had a furled black umbrella, the kind that had a metal spike on the bottom, that she was concentrating on spinning. When it fell over, she put her hands on her hips and frowned at it. 

Adam forced himself not to smile, and didn’t like the way his dead heart seemed livelier when she gave him a little wave and walked to meet him. “The lake?” she asked. 

He grunted his agreement.

Their silence was companionable as they covered the few blocks to the waterfront.

The large lake that served as a sort of front yard to the town was beautiful and surprisingly clean. A massively liberal local government and the environmental sciences department at the university worked hand in hand to keep it that way as much as possible. Adam loved the sound of the water, and fish and plants were almost all he could smell from it. The mosaic stone walkway that skirted next to it for several miles had been made as an installation piece by a famous artist who had graduated from there and wanted to give something back. 

No sooner had they stepped onto it when Kay asked, “What were you working on?”

“Hmmm?” Adam picked up a pebble and skipped it along the surface. The sound of it skimming and then the final plop were very satisfying. “What did you do on your day off?” 

He knew that for Kay not answering a question, and doing so thoroughly, was impossible. “I had breakfast, blackberry jam on toast with coffee, and then did laundry. I had to go to the laundromat because one of the machines is broken, but that was fine because I had dry cleaning to pick up as well. Then after lunch - I made a turkey sandwich and finished the coffee over ice - I spent the day reading. What were you working on?” 

She was also not to be put off most of the time.

“What did you have for dinner? You left that bit of excitement out.”

He could feel her tense next to him as she answered, “Pasta salad. It wasn’t exciting. Nothing I do is exciting. I know that. And if you don’t want to tell me what you are working on you could just say so rather than have me list off the boring elements of my life. We can not talk at all.”

There were odd things about Kay that he didn’t understand. Yes, her intelligence and deep curiosity were the reason that their approximation of a friendship worked for him - God only knew why it worked for her, since even he found himself a tiresome ass a lot of the time - but it was that ingrained peculiarity, her weird preciseness, as if worried about getting things wrong, the need to be comprehensive about even minutiae, and her persnicketiness about certain things, made her…

Fascinating. Loathe as he was to admit it, she fucking fascinated him.

With a side dish of infuriation. 

He had not read her father’s book and he wasn’t going to. 

“I was composing.” 

She stopped, “Oh.” It was cool enough that he could see the sound leave her mouth. He wondered if she was cold. Her coat certainly wasn’t heavy and he couldn’t smell the wool or cotton of a sweater beneath it, and Kay didn’t wear artificial fibers if it could be helped. Adam was pretty certain that was why she smelled so good.

“Look, I’m sorry for being a bastard about it, earlier and now. It’s just,” he slicked his gloves over his mane, “it has been a very long time since I’ve even thought about working on a new piece, let alone actually doing the work, so I’m a bit protective of it, and worried that talking about or stopping for too long, means that the inspiration will be gone.”

She cocked her head at him, her eyes soft behind her glasses, “Oh, then you should go back. We can do this another time.” She started to turn around and without thinking he reached out and grasped her arm just above the elbow. 

They both froze. 

Adam was not a toucher and Kay did not like to be touched. Indeed, he noticed over the years that other than an occasional handshake she avoided even brushing another person’s hand when giving change back. One night, when he’d been in on appraisal, a woman who she had gone to grade school with had stopped in the store while on a visit back home and they had a long, friendly talk. When she was ready to leave she surprised her with a hug.

He’d been fairly certain Kay was going to faint. Luckily she had pulled herself together before the other woman noticed. 

“Sorry,” he said, letting her go as if they had burned each other. He certainly felt burned. “I meant it when I said I needed a break. Let’s just walk.” She hesitated. “You can ask me five questions and I’ll answer three of them.”

With a nod she turned on her heel and they strolled together. He could feel her thinking. When they reached where the green part of the mosaic ended and the purple started she asked, “Where are you originally from? When were you born? What is your real name? Have you ever met anyone famous? How did you end up like this?”

“England, in Surrey. 1620. Yes.”

“Yes.” she snipped at him. “You know that I want to know  _ what  _ famous people.” He knew she was mostly mad because she had been hoping against hope he would answer the last question. She’d already asked him a dozen times.

“Yes,” he snipped back, “too bad you didn’t ask that. Famous people. Fuck, I wasn’t a starfucker, if that’s what you are asking, though I have… never mind.”

“Name one pers-! Wait!” Now she grabbed his arm, but let go so quickly it felt like a leaf brushing his sleeve. “1620? That means next year is your four-hundredth birthday!”

“I had realized,” he kept walking and her footsteps scurried a little in catching up with him.

“That’s… you should… we… I’m going to throw you a party!”

“No you fucking won’t.” Now he put his head down and walked faster. Fast enough that she could keep up, too fast for her to want to talk while she did it. He thought.

“A little party. You. Me. Earl.”

“And what,” he hissed over his shoulder, “you eat cake and I get blood from a diabetic? Play games? I beat you both at trivia and then you play pin the tail on the werewolf? I hate parties, even small ones, and my birthday is well past irrelevant.”

“So what do your kind celebrate? Your being made day?” her voice was breathy with effort and for the briefest moment, Adam felt himself get hard. Just a flash of hardness, almost painful, and then nothing. 

Another thing he hadn’t experienced since- 

“You’re right.”

“That you celebrate your being made days?” She sounded excited as well as almost out of breath.

“No, that I probably should get back to work. Let’s turn around.”

Slowing down his walk, Adam turned, allowing himself only the slightest glimpse of her flushed and disappointed face. Trying to be a little conciliatory, he told her, “I died in 1650. If we are still fri- in contact then I’ll let you throw me a wake. You must be freezing, and I have  _ do _ get back to work, so let’s get you home.”

They did talk on the way back, mostly Kay telling him she had finally added some of the music he had recommended to her Spotify account, which was a typical one step forward one step back victory as far as he was concerned. “I very much like The Magnetic Fields,” she added, which came as no surprise at all. “Especially ‘The Book of Love,’” she said wistfully. Which did surprise him. Kay seemed profoundly uninterested in romance.

Even the boyfriend that she had victoriously stomp danced through the store after breaking up with him those years before she had only dated briefly and the few times Adam may have incidentally seen them out and about they had seemed about as intimate together as two homophobes worried that having dinner together alone would make them look gay.

When they arrived at her place, she gestured to the door, “It’s probably good you have to get back. I was going to be polite and ask if you wanted to come up, but since you can’t eat or drink anything I’m not sure why you would.”

Adam’s cock, who again made itself briefly known, unfortunately could. 

“Me, either. Good night,” he said, leaving her still standing there.

The notes poured out of him. There was the sound of the stone on water. The hiss of wet, dying leaves as the wind stirred them. His bootheels clicking on the mosaic stones. Kay’s hurried breaths.

When he finally fell into bed as he felt the sun rising and bearing him downwards, Adam closed his eyes with a greater sense of satisfaction than he’d felt since-

“Adam….” 

Eve was whispering to him. 

He found her in the garden where they had married for the third time. England in high summer, filled with moonlight, and scent of sunlight could still be detected on the warmed soil. Moonflowers, and lilies, and night-blooming jasmine were thick enough in the humidity for Adam to lick off of the surface of the air. 

On a swing, dressed in yards of silk and lace, Eve swung languorously back and forth, stilling at his approach. When he was close enough he fell to his knees and put his head on her lap, wrapping a hand around her leg, that he could barely feel beneath the miles of tulle that made up her petticoats. He buried his face and wept, “Eve. Oh my Eve, I’ve missed you.”

He took in her scent. The skin, and the peppery cornflower oil of it, her mane, rinsed in camomille, her ancient blood moving slowly. 

“My darling,” she crooned, tracing her long fingers through his mane, over his shoulders, “I have longed for you. But we have only a little time. All of these years and still so little time. I must warn you. You must not….”

He sat back on his heels, her voice had grown weaker and weaker, trailing off. Eve was fading, like a photograph. The edges of her seemed to curl and there was a smell of burning, and even as he shouted her name and reached toward her she turned to a sheet of ash wavered and then collapsed, covering him in grey.

The next night, when Kay called, he let the phone ring.


	7. The Past is a Different Country, and Some of Us Still Live There

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We learn a bit more about Adam

  
  


London - 1650

Jem’s father, his second father, Ambrosius, had warned him that what he hungered for could not be fed by blood. “You, my beautiful boy, you are twice cursed. All of our kind are cursed to starve for blood and shun the light. For God and His beloved Son have turned Their backs upon us. Beyond that suffering, you are one of those, much like my brother in death Gildas, for which blood is not a mere appetite of the flesh, but of the essence of life itself. When you drink you join too deeply with those you sup from.”

When he’d found Jem dying as he had crossed the field of the dead in Dunbar those weeks before, praying for the fallen and searching for those who might be saved, Ambrosius had been unable to leave him to his fate. 

He was the most lovely man Ambrosius had ever seen, even in a thousand years of life and he had knelt beside Jeremiah to pray for his soul. 

When he touched his hand, music had flooded his senses and he knew that he had to save him, to bring him over, he had told him this when Jem had woken in the darkness, clutching at his chest, expecting the ruin left by musket fire but feeling only cool, whole flesh. In that dark place, a tomb, it had turned out, Ambrosius, with a gentle smile that split his heavy grey beard and the eyes of a regretful murderer, had fed him on blood from a stone bottle and started his tutelage in the ways of their kind before setting them off for London.

Their kind were safer in crowds.

And better fed.

That night, the night he had first learned what Ambrosius had meant, he had put a hand on Jem’s shoulder, where he crouched at his feet cradling the dead maiden, her golden hair trailing in the muck of the London alleyway, his bloody tears staining the white kerchief that covered her bosom. 

When Jem had first tasted her, the week before, it had overwhelmed him. He felt…

He felt  _ everything _ she was. The tenderness of it, and the closeness, and the unexpectedness, and the fear, and the anxiety, too, were enough that she was able to flee as he stood stunned and half in love with her from those few drops that made who she was blossom within him. 

Her blood was like golden honey suckled straight from the comb, still hot from the hive, warming him through and he walked the London streets til dawn, dazed with the sense of her.

For the next week he had stalked her, waiting. She had not told anyone what had happened, knowing that though she was a virtuous thing it was too easy to be taken for a whore. Jem only wanted to feel the warmth of her love of her sister again. The pleasure she took in the lace she made to help her family eat. The laugh of the tall, red-haired boy that had given her a posy once, before going north to find work. The joy she felt at prayer. Even the pain coming from the bad tooth in the back of her mouth. 

When he found her again, his eyes held her captive. This time he knew what to do to bring her to him willingly. Jem held her so closely, so tenderly, nuzzling and kissing and only when she was pliant did he bite and suck. He drank her simple yet loving sister and her clever fingers that made such pretty lace and the laughter and the red-haired boy and the posy and her love of God, and the rotten tooth that ached.

_ Not enough _ , he thought to himself through a haze of lusty need that he could not glut. 

He felt her heart slowing as the blood throbbed into his greedy mouth, killing her because he couldn’t get close enough to her. Her blood was the cure for the loneliness of life for him, if only for a time.

The father of his new life had suspected and cursed himself for being too late to save both the girl and, in a way, his child. Jem had felt the girl die in a way that most of their kind would never experience. 

For the rest of his undead life, Jem would grieve for a girl whose name he never knew. 

Versailles - 1700 - 

It was easy to kill in Versailles. 

That was what Phillipe had told Jem when he had lured him from Amsterdam. The Dutch were too orderly a people to allow bodies in the canals to go unexamined or investigated. Even the poorest wretches, most destitute streetwalkers, and depraved artists were looked for when they disappeared, not out of any sympathy or fellow feeling from those in power. 

They just liked to keep things tidy.

But in Versailles - Versailles the gorgeous, Versailles the gaudy, Versailles the crowded and filthy and disorganized and glorious you could kill a pretty boy come up from the country with a petition, or a plump breasted serving maid scurrying between salons, stuff them beneath the rug, and no one would even notice the smell. What a delight it was, Phillipe had crowed, to lure a lovely through the Hall of Mirrors, enjoying their confused longing as they saw their own transitory beauty reflected back at them over and over, and then to kill in an alcove beside a room where the Queen was losing at cards? 

Jem hated to kill. But he was so hungry. 

He was always hungry. 

Ambrosius had learned over hard-fought centuries to control his hunger, and his work as a chirurgeon and tooth-puller meant he had ways to gain blood without killing or turning those he drank from into thralls who would eventually waste away anyway for the sake of their thirsty master. Jem could not bear such filthy work, surrounded by the stink of the living. Once he and his maker had separated he found himself again hunting and taking life. 

At least he had learned that if he drank swiftly, he could save himself from the swooning, weak, ridiculousness of his particular condition. That, and taking care of whom he chose to fill himself with. 

Men, he found, were less likely to create such fragility in him. Cruel, murderous men whose own viciousness recoiled upon them with Jem as its medium. Parliamentarian soldiers, freshly back from Ireland, having murdered and burned and raped in the name of their nation and ending the tyranny of the Pope. Beaters of those women and children they were meant to protect and care for, and glutted themselves on gin because they felt themselves the be the ones wronged. Be they bravos, millers, foot-pads, rapparees, badgers, swaddlers, tatars, kidnappers, or shankers, each found himself hoist on his own petard. 

Jem kept house near the River Fleet, hard by Hampstead Heath where many of those he preyed upon chose to prey on those forced to travel through that wilderness. He would drink deep and return home, fiery with rage and drunk with their blood, to compose works that none would hear. Moving from spinet to viola de gamba to lute and back again until the sun rose. 

For close to thirty years he had haunted London, hiding from the few familiar faces of those he knew who had not fallen to Cromwell’s men, at first from them recognising him, and then from his pain at seeing how old they were, of watching age take them.

Afterward, he had gone north, living in Scotland for a time, having plenty of furious Border raiders, and the English soldiers to feed on, then drifted over to Ireland, where the sight of what had been done to the people and the land drove him across the sea to Norway, then Sweden, then Amsterdam, where he met again with Phillipe, one of the only of the others of his kind he had met in the past. 

When Phillipe had suggested Jem join him on a trip to France he’d been so sick of himself and London that he jumped at the chance, even knowing how travel would go. At least there, unknown and with no fear of being recognised, he might be able to publish some of his work.

“You hell-born babe!” Phillipe had laughed at him as they sat in the salon of the most notoriously depraved brothel in the city, waiting for a specific, pox-ridden gentleman to be finished spending himself for the night. “You’ve been counted amongst the glorious dead for fifty years and yet you think any soul would know you? Still,” he leaned forward, his blue eyes avid, his golden curls falling forward to frame the series of lies that made up his beautifully innocent features, “with such a face it makes good sense to know you’d be remember’d. I thought myself the farthest fallen angel, till I saw you.” 

Decadent Phillipe, who God-fearing Ambrosius had loathed both for his rude contempt of the mortals and for his disgusting love of feeding on the sick and dying, had none of Jem’s maker’s fears of being discovered by the mortals. “Come to Versaille! You will love it, they will adore you, your music will be played, your belly filled with the blood of bad men, and your bed filled with the bodies of pretty, plump titted coquettes.”

“And,” Phillipe had gone on, wiping his mouth with the back of a gloved hand as he let the poxy body of his meal fall into a puddle of rain and horse-piss in front of his own home where they had stalked him after leaving the bagnio, “you can meet my beloved, perfect queen of love, ancient as days, fresh as dew upon a petal.” He kicked the corpse over so he could more easily remove his purse and watch.

“I have word that she is traveling from Vienna to Versailles as well. You will adore her as I do. Or,” he laughed like a drunken man, “I’ll kill you!”

“Aren’t you going to dispose of him?” Jem asked, as Phillipe set his cane to the paving stones to saunter away from the dead man. 

“Why? The  _ humans _ have people for that sort of thing.”

Jem hated Versailles. 

Golden and glorious, with perfect gardens. Filled with marvels of art, science, and nature, books on every subject, most never opened and easy to borrow, furnishings more perfectly structured for appearance than use. 

The world’s most magnificent toliet.

It stunk worse than Phillipe had warned, the aristocrats who lived there, forced to do so to be close to their Sun King, relieved themselves like beasts everywhere. So did their beasts, actually, he thought as he watched a ridiculous, nervous little dog be set on the floor by its mistress - an aging beauty dressed in pink - toddle with shaking legs a few feet, and shit on the carpeting before returning to be fed another sweetmeat, no doubt the reason for the ghastly fug coming from its droppings.

Additonal to its horrendous stench, was the casual viciousness of the powerful to those seeking their favor. Though such behavior had always been, the pure concentration of it at Versailles, where every creature wanting advancement or the King’s notice gathered, meant their taste for the hateful pleasure of toying with their victims - those in need of their favor, their money, or their love - grew worse and worse, never to be glutted. 

Louis himself was not especially malevolent, his power being so absolute that he knew that there was  _ nothing _ he could not do, therefore making him less likely to do it. 

No wonder Phillipe loved it, Jem thought, as he sat down at the harpsichord that the Duchesse who was sponsoring tonight's soiree had arranged for him. 

While cards were played and lovers flirted and gossips spread scandal, Jem played.

Those courtiers and aristocrats who bothered to listen, who gathered about him and sighed and made a great dramatic show of appreciation were those who, like the Duchesse, were enamored of him. They waved fans as if their delicate systems were taxed beyond endurance by their love of music, when he knew their cheeks and loins were flushed by him and the sight of his hands spanning the keys, not his work.

After he finished, the applause and orgiastic sighs and cries of happiness were enough to make Jem want to take his heels. 

When he had finished his bows and they dispersed, after dropping jewels and billet-doux where he might take them from the filthy carpet, he saw Phillipe approach, a woman dressed in pale gold on his arm. 

She was as tall as Phillipe, as fair as the gentle sun of winter, and her peculiar exquisiteness was like no one Jem had seen before. Her eyes were filled with a kind of mischievous wonder at his music. 

Before Phillipe could proffer an introduction, she raced a few steps forwards, boldly taking his gloved hands into her own, her slender fingers covered in the finest kid. “Mastro, I have required some heavenly music, which even now I do,” she quoted. “Like the music of the spheres moves the planets and stars, so your music moves the worlds within me.”

Jem was taken aback, by her fearlessness, by his dead heart longing to beat, and, taking in the sight of her animal-keen eyes and powdered mane, by the knowledge that she was one of his kind.

“Who are you?” he asked in astonished wonder.

“As I was about to say,” Phillipe smirked, “Jeremiah, this is, finally, for she has kept me waiting for her, is Eve.”

She laughed kindly, “Jeremiah? That doesn’t suit you  _ at all _ .” She tapped his chest with her furled fan. “We can do better than that, I think.,” Eve said before offering him her arm.

2019 -

Adam’s fingers were dark with ink, even their immortal tips were tired and worn from two weeks straight of working. He was starving. 

The store had been closed for hours, and he sent a quick text to his connection, even though he hated to communicate that way. Not that it could be called communication. It could barely be called an information exchange. But it was the one concession he was willing to make since everything else in their business arrangement was handled the way Adam wanted things. 

Considering the amount of money he paid, it was only reasonable. 

Ten minutes later he shrugged into his leather jacket. He used to dress in scrubs and pretend to be a doctor when he went to see her, but being a university and teaching hospital there were plenty of students and faculty around at weird hours so half of the time he didn’t bother. 

He kind of missed the surgical mask, though. At least tonight it was cool enough out to wrap a scarf around his face, which he did as he climbed the stairs.

On the top of the landing, he could see a small, light green envelope, trimmed with a border of black eyeglasses, and “Adam” written in very legible cursive across the front. 

Just in case someone else found it behind the secret door that led to his lair and thought the note might be for them, he thought, mentally rolling his eyes. 

For a moment he almost crumpled it up. The scent of Kay, her warm skin scented by the lavender lotions she favored. Her hair had brushed across the paper at some point, leaving a trace of rosemary. Just a bit of the sugar she buried her tea in. 

Overwhelming it all, the distinct, personal, impossible copper of her blood.

He knew that if he were to open it he would be buried in her.

Before he could stop himself he took off one of his gloves and ran the barest tip of his forefinger over his own name, tracing where her pen had written. A shudder ran through him. Everything was too sensitive. Annoyance, righteous anger, worry, melancholy, an ache that he knew too well, and a touch of humor at the absurdity of herself.

Kay.

Quickly putting his glove back on, Adam tucked the note into the inner pocket of his jacket, pushed the bookcase out his way, and went into the night in search of the safely boring blood of strangers.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have taken Adam's pre-death name, but not his backstory, from Jeremiah Clarke, an English composer of the period after the Civil War, who killed himself when he fell in love with one of his students, a beautiful woman of high birth who he could not have.


	8. We Do Thing For Reasons We Cannot Control

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kay learns that Adam knows at least two people.

After the night that Kay played The 5th Dimension for her entire shift she realized two things. 

She really liked The 5th Dimension and it was possible that Adam did as well - since she had gone on the assumption that any music her grandmother enjoyed he would hate, which might be wrong. Also, Adam was more than just ignoring her. 

It wasn’t another case of his being busy, whatever that meant in the case of a basement-dwelling misanthrope who didn’t need to worry about things like buying toilet paper, or cooking. Or breathing.

It occurred to her that Adam probably hadn’t sneezed in decades, or more properly, centuries. “He’s probably never even bought Kleenex…” she wondered to herself.

“What?” Genie asked as she dumped the trash cans into a large bag.

“Nothing. I can finish up.”

Genie stopped and looked at her, frowning. “Love trouble? Don’t worry, Antiquarian Guy is into you. He’s gonna call.” 

“He’s not. It’s not like that with us. We’re not an us. We have not us like tendencies.” Kay knew she was babbling. Just the idea of her and Adam … that Genie had thought they were … If Adam knew his irritation would shake the pillars of heaven, she was sure.

“You could,” Genie responded, unaware that she had put Kay into a kind of crisis at the idea of looming, grumpy, undead Adam taking her on a date. 

Genie - ignorant of the awkward scenario going on in Kay’s head of Adam taking her out and ordering her dinner in perfect, snotty French,  _ without asking what she wanted _ . To the slavish delight of a haughty waiter who turned subservient when Adam glared at him while covering his wine glass with a large, long-fingered hand, muttering “Je ne bois pas ... Bordeaux.” - pulled on her coat and called her boyfriend to say she would be early. 

“Ya babo ya na jigeum tteonalgeoya maegdonaldeueseo mannayo,” she barked, waving goodbye.

After she was gone Kay thought it might be nice to have someone to call an idiot and meet at McDonald’s. 

Someone who could clearly never be Adam. Because while it was possible he’d purchased Kleenex at some point for a non-sneezing reason she was certain he would never, probably  _ could _ never, go into a fast food place. Nor could she imagine ever feeling comfortable enough with him to call him an idiot, let alone in that slightly sexy way Genie said it to Dae.

For a few minutes she hesitated about leaving the note she’d written him that morning, all of the while wracking her brains about what had happened between them by the lake that had upset him enough to cut her off entirely. Had she offended some bit of esoteric vampire etiquette by wanting to invite him into her place? Or had he just decided she was too uninteresting and awkward to be bothered with any longer?

It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. But Adam hadn’t seemed bored. She had thought he liked her, actually. He’d seemed … less annoyed by her than he was by just about everything else. But, again, she often didn’t have a very good sense about who liked her and who didn’t. 

For a moment she thought about her parents and let just a little bitterness towards them seep out of where she kept it sequestered in her heart. Being raised by them had left her as well as her brothers unprepared for dealing with normal people. Then she quickly tamped down on it, knowing they loved them and had done their best, which was all anyone could ask from any parents. 

Mom was pretty decent for a sociopath. She made a real effort to pretend to have empathy and caring for the sake of her kids. Except when she was busy with work, or writing a new article. Pure mathematics and mothering weren’t very compatible for most people, Kay imagined.

And dad … Kay was the closest to their dad of all of them, the most comfortable with his great enthusiasms and his misunderstandings, maybe because she was the oldest, or because she was the only neurotypical female in their house. She was the one who had the easiest time understanding it wasn’t that dad didn’t feel things the right way so much as he felt everything so much most of the time the feelings of others were like a speaker turned up so high it was distorted and fuzzing out and actually painful. 

She had learned to be precise and calm, and to speak out her emotions when she needed to, and to give plenty of solid information. It made her weird. Kay knew that. Enough people had told her.

All that in mind, she had still been pretty sure Adam had liked spending time with her. 

She walked through the store, picking up stray books, petting Cobweb before refilling his bowl, he had stopped hissing at her now that she probably didn’t smell like the undead any longer, and flipping off lights. Even though she knew she couldn’t hear anything from the basement she found herself still trying to catch a note or a soft, sullen, British, “Fucking hell.” 

Nothing.

Shoving the note under the bookcase, making sure that it would glide all of the way through the door as well, Kay hoped that he would at least bother to tell her if he was not interested in continuing their arrangement. She’d been ghosted more than once, and it hurt more to know that you weren’t worth a goodbye.

On the street, she decided she wanted a drink rather than her empty apartment.

The coffeehouse was packed with mildly manic underclassmen talking to each other whilst tapping on their various devices, and hunched, exhausted graduate students staring with dazed confusion at their laptops. The smell of roasting coffee from the back of the converted warehouse space and the mix of body odors took Adam briefly back to the coffeehouses of London where he had gone to argue politics and read the daily broadsheets, pretending to drink the thick brew of the era. 

He could almost feel the tacky ink of the freshly run papers, and hear the loud voices of Whigs and Tories - strident, with an accent that no longer existed, save perhaps in some of the more remote corners of England. Adam wondered if some day, hundreds of years from now he would miss the flattish, near sing-song of the American Middle West. 

He very much doubted it.

Fucking Tories. Even all of these years later their Royalist cocksucking made his blood boil.

His connection, Kat, a nurse who had inherited him when the blood tech he’d originally gotten his supply from retired to Jamaica on the money he’d made from Adam - waved to him from the large, wooden table she’d secured right at the front window. One or two students, clutching coffees and pastries and stack of books looked hopefully at her, that she might tell them they could share. 

She didn’t.

“I don’t understand why you want to meet here,” Adam said, having frightened enough milling children out of his way, sitting.

“Probably because you hate it,” Kat answered, picking up her mug of whatever she was drinking - something with lavender, from what Adam could smell over the olfactory din that was starting to give him a headache.

Lavender. Like Kay’s skin.

Fuck. He needed to stop thinking about her. He was sure that was what Eve was trying to warn him about in the dreams - he’d had five of them now, each from a different era of their marriage, each cut off too quickly - that Kay was dangerous to him. For him. 

God, he might have to fucking move…

“Hey!” Kat snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Where were you? The Reformation?”

Unlike his former connection, Kat wasn’t afraid of him. At all. Not in a cocky, I-have-shit-on-you way, but in a you-need-me-I-can-live-without-you way. That very attitude was why he’d avoided dealing with nurses. Intimidating a nurse was on par with intimidating a grizzly bear. Both things were possible, but the level of grim investment and violence involved exhausted him just to think about. At thirty, and years into her career, the attractive brunette had the fucks left of a ninety-year-old. 

“Do you have it?” he asked. 

“Not as much as usual. You didn’t give me much notice this time.” She slid a white plastic bag from some chain store over to him. He hissed and grabbed it quickly, putting it beneath the table. “You realize that you doing that is way more suspicious than me giving you a thermos in a bag, right? The sunglasses don’t help. Whatever. The only reason anyone is looking at us is because you look like that.” She gestured at all of him.

Adam wasn’t in the mood for their usual banter. Or her usual banter than he allowed to bounce off him.

“When can I get the rest of it?” 

“If you meet me here on … let’s say Friday, I’ll have your normal delivery.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a stack of bills, “See?” she pointed, “That’s suspicious. That,” she pointed at the bag, “just looks like you left your thermos at work and I’m bringing it to you.” She took the money and counted it despite what she had just said, then frowned at the window, “Is that someone you know? Of course not, you don’t know anyone. She probably just thinks you’re hot. Which you are.”

He did know someone. Now. 

Almost unrecognizable in a cool black jacket, Kay was standing outside of the coffee house, staring at them. As usual, she was either unable to hide her feelings or simply didn’t bother. Her blue eyes, so big behind those old fashioned frames, looked a little stunned, and her mouth was open just a touch. 

“This is a full payment, so I’ll count it against the next time. Does that work? Adam?”

Kay was upset. 

He heard Eve’s voice, instead of Kat’s, “Oh, Adam,” trying to tell him something more.

Kay closed her mouth in a prim, hurt little way and was gone, 

Again, Kay thought that taking up jogging might have been a good idea, because of the vampire. Rather than heading back towards her place, or the store, or anywhere in particular she found herself in Greenfield Park, a long strip of land separating the town from the University. The leaves had turned and started to drop, so where the lights dotted infrequently through it they threw odd shadows on the ground. Mostly it was dark, quiet, and empty, everything she wanted at the moment.

Out of breath, cutting across the grass, sweating through her dress, the cashmere sweater that she had found for a song at Goodwill, and the black denim jacket she had bought on a whim.

A whim thinking she would look less … twee when she and Adam were together. 

Angry for no reason she could name, but certainly more at herself than at him, Kay ripped it off, knowing she looked like an idiot in it. Because she was an idiot. A lonely, pathetic idiot who thought she had made friends with a monster. That a monster would be friends with her.

Frustrated and not knowing why she was in such a state, she whipped the jacket towards a garbage can, never wanting to see the damned thing again.

Adam, suddenly standing in front of her, snagged it from the air, “You’re going to need that. It’s getting cold out here.” His voice seemed even deeper than normal.

“Wha-” She barely stopped before barrelling into him, bending over, her hands on her thighs to brace herself as she tried to catch her breath. 

She’d known he was fast, but he’d been coming from the opposite direction, which meant he’d circled around the park before catching up with her. He was holding a Walgreens bag. 

Maybe he did buy Kleenex, after all.

He draped the jacket over her. She shrugged it off again. 

He rolled his eyes at her, picked it up and covered her with it before she could step away. She rolled her eyes right back at him. “You don’t have any say about my … jacket wearing. If I want to get cold I’ll get cold, thank you,” again taking it off. 

“Very fucking cold, considering you’re dripping,” he said. They stared at each other for a long minute, her chin jutting forward, his upper lip raised in the slightest hint of a snarl. His eyes were uncanny in the dark, like those of an animal that could see better at night than she could by day. 

Kay shivered.

“I told you,” he snipped. “Put your fucking jacket on and stop behaving like a fucking child.”

“I’m not cold. I’m … I don’t know what I am. Who was that woman?”

His head cocked, and his eyes were narrow, “Why did you run when you saw us?”

“I was mad because you ghosted me.” He started to laugh and suddenly Kay was furious at him. She pointed a finger at him, almost touching that aristocratic nose of his, adrenalin making her skin prickle and her voice shake. Frustrated tears, the kind that had been her tell all of her life, threatened to spill, and she spoke quickly to get the words out before they started. “Don’t _ you _ fucking  _ laugh _ at me, you asshole. I don’t deserve to be laughed at. Not by you, not by anyone. I’m sick of-... Never mind! Go back to your basement and I promise to forget you’re there.”

She turned on her heel, intending to march away from him with both the remaining crumbs of her dignity and her now loathed jacket clenched in her hands, when he said, “Kay…” There was a rusty kind of regret in his voice. He didn’t follow her, but his voice did, and she found herself turning. 

Adam was looking at her, an abashed look on his face, a hand out to beseech her, his mane a little wild from having run so it halo’d his wonderful face, all like a saint in a Renaissance painting. “Kay, she’s my con-”

The word was cut in two by a low, cat-like growl, turning into a human shriek that shredded the air and Kay’s nerves, followed by the thud of one fast-moving body hitting another as Adam was taken to the ground. 

He tossed his attacker away like they were made of paper, and they rolled and skidded, their boot heels snagging in the wet grass, leaving muddy rents in the ground. For a moment it did not move, shaking out its long, nearly white mane, while Adam sidestepped to put himself between her and it. 

Standing they, for Kay couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, or both or neither, jerked their head oddly, lifting a corner of a thin, bloodless mouth that was like a knife cut in their pale face. 

A fang glittered in the moonlight.

One of the others…. 

Adam had never told her anything about them, save that they existed. And that few were like him. 

Kay considered running. Her mind did. Her legs had other ideas. It lifted a long-nailed hand towards her. “I’m going to pull your fucking spine out, Jem, and then I’m going to drink that prissy little virgin dry, even though she probably tastes like ditch water.” Their voice was broken, as if something terrible had happened to their throat long ago, and thickly accented.

Adam and she spoke at the same time.

“I’m not a virgin.”

“So Phillipe finally found me,” he stopped and turned to frown at her before turning back to the other. “And sent you to do his dirty work. Like the peasant you just can’t stop being. Things never change, do they, Jean?”

“Non, you aristo cunt.  _ I  _ found you by myself. When I bring your head to Phillipe he’ll reward me,  _ and _ be furious that I did what he could not.” They sniffed the air, “You smell weak. Still drinking from the bottle? Like a babe?”

“And you still look like the corpse sucker that you’ve always been,” Adam said. "Sickly. Poisoned. Rotting.”

Their face - skeletal, with strange blotches like a rotting gourd - did look sick. It bellowed with rage and the two of them flew at each other for another pass of blows and bites, moving so quickly that she couldn’t understand, or even properly see, what was happening.

After a few, wild minutes, with sounds like a wolf fighting a lynx, they separated, Adam staggering back towards her. “Run…”

Even Kay could smell blood. She looked at Adam. His leather jacket was tattered along one side and she could see a gleam of wet underneath. In the dark, his shirt looked like it was splattered with ink.

“Please,” he beseeched her, his eyes wide and afraid, “run.”

“If you run, that’ll be more fun...” the other sing-songed, as it sauntered towards them, licking its fingers. 

“Hungry, Jean? You must be, with fucking traveling and all,” Adam said, “here, you disgusting ghoul. Have a drink on me.” He reached into the bag that he had dropped when he’d first been attacked, pulling out a metal thermos and flinging it at the other’s head. They easily dodged, but when it hit the sidewalk behind them it burst open, sending a gout of blood upwards.

“Bastard…” they hissed, turning as if pulled by an irresistible force, kneeling, licking the blood from the concrete, moaning and shivering as they did.

Before she could look away, Adam picked up Kay, throwing her over his shoulder so the breath was knocked out of her, and ran.

  
  
  
  
  



	9. A Friend in Need is One Thing...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam is thirsty.

Kay had a number of questions having learned many things that night, including that there was a second back entrance to the store through a secret room. Which seemed even to her like a rather small thing in the grand scheme of all that she had seen since leaving Paul’s bar. But it was the easiest thing to focus on. 

That and making herself small and still on Adam’s overstuffed couch and nursing her bruised abdomen as he paced back and forth, looking like he was having an argument and losing. 

After the terrifying madness in the park, he had run fast enough that Kay had a hard time breathing as they sped down alleys and through backyards, a route that he had clearly taken before. Hidden. Secret.

He had deposited her on her feet when they were behind the store, ushering her quickly in, through the secret room, and down a spiral staircase into his lair. “Stay there,” he ordered, pointing at the sofa. 

Kay was disinclined to argue, no matter how much she didn’t like being barked at. Not moving felt safe. 

Ripping off his torn leather jacket and throwing it into a corner with a hiss as the half-congealed blood from his side made it stick for a second, he stalked away into one of the darker corner of the basement where there was a small kitchenette. There was the sound of water running, and a very animal snarl. After a few minutes he was back, without his gloves and shirtless, his horrible wound distracting her from that. 

There were dry, rusty-looking streaks of blood running down his stomach and his leather jeans that flaked and fell away as he moved. 

Kay felt a little ill. Human blood would not have dried that completely or been that color, she was almost certain.

Thrusting a glass of water into her hand, a scum of dust that he clearly hadn’t noticed floating on the top, he was gone again, behind a large, ornate and rather dilapidated wooden screen that separated off part of the basement.

She didn’t drink the water even though she was thirsty, but in her shocked state holding on to the cool, blue glass felt comforting. Again, after a few minutes Adam was back, carrying a Thermos like the one he’d thrown at the other in the park and a very delicate, crystal sherry glass in the other. 

“I gave you that to drink, not make a pet of it,” he said, spinning the lid of the Thermos open and upturning it over a glass. 

She held it up for him to see. He frowned, “Shit.” A few drops of blood plopped into the glass, barely enough to fill half of its tiny cup. “Shit!” he yelled at the sight of it.

He drank it quickly, like a shot, and then licked the glass clean, and the edge of the Thermos as well. The smell of the blood and his fangs made her feel funny.

His tongue did too, but in a different way.

Adam stood up in that very contained way of his, his arms close to his sides, his head down, and started to pace in the little space available. It was slow and unsteady, and for the first time since she’d met him Kay thought he looked tired. Physically. 

Once or twice he would stop, look at her as if about to speak, and then start pacing again. Finally, his head dropped and when he looked back at her his fangs were fully exposed. “Your jacket is in the park. Jean is not going to be able to do much before dawn, especially after gorging on untainted blood. They are probably going to hole up soon. Then, when it’s dark, they are going to take your jacket and track you with it, and if you go back to your apartment they will rip you to pieces and drink what’s left from your carpet.”

“I don’t have a carpet.”

“Really?”

“Sorry.”

“They will do that, and then they will come after me, and between this,” he gestured to his wound, “and the fact that I haven’t had a proper meal in over a day, they’ll kill me almost as easily as they will you.”

His voice was defeated, the mental and emotional exhaustion rolled off of him, “If you stay here, at some point I will be so hungry that I probably won’t be able to fucking stop myself from feeding on you. If I am that far gone I could hurt you. Maybe not kill you, but hurt you badly. Maybe _ fucking _ kill you.” He practically choked on the last words, on the effort to get any of the words out, in fact. There was a thud to his normally musical voice. 

Before he could go on, Kay knew where this was going and she took pity on him. “You want some of my blood before that happens. So you can get better and maybe protect me. Both of us.”

Abruptly, he raised his chin and sneered down at her, stung, “Oh, I can protect both of us against that  _ cochon _ . At my best, they couldn’t touch me.” Then he sagged, “I haven’t been at my bloody best for longer than I can say. And yes, Kay, I am sorry but yes, I need to drink from you.”

Gulping, her mouth dry and her heart hammering and her palms soaked, Kay nodded and kept nodding compulsively as she straightened up, her feet on the ground, her knees primly together, “Um, yes, very well, yes. I can see where that is the only option.” She looked into his eyes. 

They were the strangest shade of green. How had she not noticed that before? Perhaps because she was trying very hard to not notice.

“I consent. Please be careful. Do you, um … have a syringe, or some apparatus?”

For a second he smirked, “Yes, shall I just pull out my full phlebotomy kit and have at this then?” It was a relief to have him back to himself if only for a bit. Standing directly over her, so she was very aware of how tall he was, Adam opened his mouth just a touch, tapping the side of his pinky to a fang, “Only this. I usually order out, so we’re doing this the old fashioned motherfucking way. I’ll be right back.”

Kay sweated through her clothes, waiting for him.

He came back, having put on a black velvet shirt and holding a white linen handkerchief. Standing in front of her he ran a hand through his wild, coarse hair, breathing hard through his nose like a horse that was ready to rear and buck before sitting. “Linen is best as the fibres won’t get caught in the wound.”

There was a bit of knowledge she would have been happy without having.

Taking her hand very gingerly, as if trying not to touch her at the same time as he turned her wrist and slid the sleeve of her blouse up, making no contact with her flesh. “I will bite you here, the median cubital vein,” one fingertip almost touched her as he traced over the blue vein, staring at it with an avidity that made her frightened.

Excited as well. No one had ever looked at her like that before, like she was important, like the sight of her made them ravenous,and maybe it was just her inner arm, and maybe the hunger was literal, but that was still something. 

Swallowing hard, Kay nodded, “Alright. That makes sense. Um … I’m sorry you have to touch me. I know you don’t like touching people.”

Adam pulled his gaze away from her vein with obvious effort, frowning at her with confused eyes. “You’re the one who doesn’t like to be touched, so I’m going to try and make this as easy on you as I can.” His voice was almost reedy, thin, nothing like it’s usual sonorous quality,and he too was shaking, clearly restraining himself. He was getting weak, and desperate. “I promise, I fucking promise….” The last was as much to himself as to her. 

“Um … why would you think I don’t like being touched?” 

Now he screwed up his face with irritation, looking like himself for the first time since the attack. “Because I’ve seen you shrink away from being touched. Often. From the first day you started in the store. Like you are about to jump out of your skin.”

She shook her head, understanding, “That’s because I’m not used to it. At all. You better do this now, before I freak out. I’m starting to get the cold sweats and my stomach is hurting enough but now the muscles are tensing and I think I might be a little light-headed.” Something occurred to her, “Since the first day I star-”

Without warning his teeth cut into her skin, her words, and her thoughts. 

The pain was terrible for just a moment, as his fangs sundered her. Kay forced herself to still, not shaking now but trembling, afraid that if she pulled she would rip herself open more, afraid that the too hard clutched would turn into claws digging to her, anchoring in her muscles to hold her still. He seemed frozen and she was trying to be, trying to not writhe against the pain.

And then his teeth were gone, and he moaned against her skin, his lips and tongue tending to the wound before he began to suck. 

The adrenaline that had kept her going for the past twenty minutes seemed to drain straight out of her with the first, greedy mouthful of blood he took.

Dark, soft pleasure swam through her so quickly she was panting in seconds, and as he grew visibly stronger with each heavy suck she felt herself weaken, but a wonderfully warm kind of weakness making her fall back against the sofa, arching her arm to offer him more, as the throb of his mouth drawing her in was echoed between her legs. 

Had she the energy, Kay knew that her own hand would be under her skirt.

Instead, with a sigh, she closed her eyes to better feel Adam, his now languid but so firm suck.

The blood was everything. 

The skin gave easily, it was so delicate, then the vein itself, with a ‘pop’ so soft only he could hear. 

That secret sound that he had not heard in a hundred years, and then the desire to savage, to open more, to rend that sweet skin and open that vein wide enough that he would be bathed in her blood. Flooded with it, his skin covered, his mouth too full to even swallow. All of Kay’s blood blanketing him in life.

_ Kay’s _ blood.

Unmoving, the way only someone hundreds of years old and without a fucking pulse could be, Adam forced himself to be calm. To count, to do nothing until he knew he wouldn’t be acting like some fucking zombie at a cheap buffet.

Then removing his fangs, with an effort that cost him, he licked the spot tenderly before sucking. Those first seconds he drew deep, those first seconds after the bite and the tensing of her muscles and the pain he knew she was in and the little cry she probably didn’t know she had made while he fought to keep from ripping her open. 

Those first seconds of her blood - salty and clean and hot, like there was an untouched, sunny ocean hidden within her - and that one little cry, together they left him hungrier, even as he felt his flesh knit. Hungrier, and harder than he had been in decades. Hard enough that he hurt as badly as he had hurt her. 

Good. That was fair. 

Desperate to not make a glutton of himself, to not make a mistake this time, to harm her no more than he had to, Adam tried everything he could think of to distract himself. He translated Ramones lyrics into Farsi. He mentally played Bach’s Partita for Violin No. 2 in D and almost assfucked the Chaconne. He tried to remember what water tasted like. Anything that would keep him from sucking her dry in moments.

Finally, he had enough that he felt his body was whole again, where the edge was off where he could enjoy. Where maybe, if he did it right this time, she could enjoy, too.

Slowly, to let himself savor the voluptuous mouthsful of her silky blood, Adam could feel the tug of her heartbeat, and himself unconsciously sucking in time with it, stroking her arm in the same rhythm as she fell, resting on the couch, her head lolling, her thighs falling open. He slid an arm behind her so he could wrap his hand around her hip and pull them closer together. The cloth was damp and she smelled so fucking good. Not just her blood. 

Kay shuddered.

With her life inside of him, he knew that she had told the truth. She  _ always _ told the truth, even when she wanted to lie. That rather than being revolted it was the shudder of someone overwhelmed and touch starved. Indeed, whose need for touch had never been properly fed. 

And she was aroused. As fully, if less painfully, as he.

He gouged his nails into the heavy upholstery of the sofa to keep from laying his hand between her legs where she needed to be soothed.

Pulling his sharp mouth away from her deliciousness for a moment, Adam closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to her wrist. 

It was happening already. He had hoped against hope that maybe time and grief had healed him of his weakness.

He hated it.

It was why he had fed, when he had fed directly, on those he loathed, those who were beneath contempt. That alone had allowed him to maintain distance, clarity, objectivity. To not desire the warmth of drowning in another. 

That, and being able to drown in Eve instead. 

He hated it. 

A thin rivulet of her blood ran down her arm, and in licking it with the barest tip of his tongue, Kay sighed, a sensual sound completely unlike her, and Adam tipped his own internal balance into that radiant place and he loved it.

Like she was a steamer trunk so jammed with treasures and wonders that it took but the lightest flick of a finger to make its lock spring open, sending its contents flying everywhere, suddenly everything around him was Kay.

With a moan of need that had nothing to do with needing more blood, Adam gathered her onto his lap, taking a few last, sustaining sips before taking up the linen handkerchief - bought in Vienna in 1910 - and pressed it to her arm so she wouldn’t keep bleeding for the minutes it would take to heal over. As they waited, he buried his face in her rosemary-scented hair, crooning his thanks, his appreciation, of how good she tasted, how sweet she had been, and still and good for him, stroking her arm while she trembled against him.

Knowing she felt how aroused he was.

Knowing how aroused she was in turn. 

Knowing.

Kay was on Adam’s lap. 

Of all of the places she thought she might sit in her life, and really, her racing and slightly drugged feeling brain thought, who thinks about where they might sit, but still, of all of those places she would never have thought of Adam’s lap. She would never have let herself think of Adam’s lap and his stroking her arm and whispering darkly into her ear how brave and delicious she was, as he rocked her a bit - he didn’t seem to know he was doing it - and his dick was pressing into her.

Her slightly altered state made her thoughts hard to compartmentalize, a thing Kay had learned to do at a young age, for functionality and protection. Now they were everywhere, including the one where she thought of how beautiful he was and how much she wanted that long, pale body, on top of her and in her. 

So beautiful, she thought, tentatively reaching up to touch the side of his face. 

He was warm, almost hot, to the touch. She would have thought cold, or at least cool.

God, Kay thought to herself, I am so wet, it has to have soaked through everything. He has to know. Soaked and weak and blushing.

“I can smell it,” he hissed to her ear, making her whole body vibrate. “I can feel it. You’re a mess, aren’t you love?” His voice was rough, ragged, and yet he crooned the words.

That went straight between her legs, too. The same as the pull of his mouth and the feel of that little, tender touch on her arm. It hurt, how bad she needed him in her, how empty and hollow she felt. Five years….

“Five years … oh, love, I’m going to take such good care of you. Of us both. But first, we both need.…” His accent was different, an echo of the past, from a time when English sounded more like it was spelled. Like centuries had peeled away from him.

Adam effortlessly lifted her so she lay, akimbo, splayed, open on the couch. With one hand he undid his thick leather belt and unbuttoned his fly. Because he was a rock star, underpants were clearly optional, and his penis was also lovely and long, but not pale, but painted all of the shades of desperate, Kay thought, briefly giddy and she laughed. 

He smiled at her.

There was a lump in her throat. Adam smiled! With soft eyes and a slight huff of breath, like a laugh as well.

Adam  _ smiled _ at her. 

“Oh, dear…” she whispered to herself. This was a terrible turn of events, but before she could examine it any further, he pushed up her skirt, his long, sharp nails gently scratching down her belly to her mons, making her writhe and beg. “Please, oh god, please I - I - I-”

“Shhh … I have to see your sweet, dewy, little gilly-flower before I strum it, love.” Looking down, he smiled, “And aren’t these adorable,” he admired using those nails to cut the sides of her panties, leaving her exposed.

Long fingers stroked deep between her labia, and two of them circled and rubbed her clit, firm and smooth and she was begging again as it was too good and she was afraid of being any more ridiculous than she already was. 

“If some fucker,” Adam’s voice was deep and hard, “told you that you were ridiculous in bed I’m going to kill him,” he said with no adornment. Then, so tenderly, “You are a splendid girl, and you couldn’t be prettier or more darling dancing under my fingers.”

Her pussy clenched at his words.

“I’m going to teach you every step and sway,” he said, pushing her legs further apart, sinking between them so he was briefly nestled against her before slowly but inexorably entering her until he was seated far enough that it almost hurt. 

Almost. 

Adam froze, his forehead touching hers, “Give me a second. It’s been a bit, and you are so swollen and tight I could spend like a beardless boy in a fucking second.”

If he had been human his chest would have been heaving, his breath panting out in effort, but he wasn’t human and for a second that made Kay panic. Then he moved and it was so good. The way he ground against her, the perfect slide in and out, the way he reached between them and gently pinched her clit at just the right moment while gritting out, “Soak my prick, love, and squeeze it tight as you can. Let it know its welcome.”

Kay thrashed, lifting her hips, needing more and closer and that and harder and harder and her heels were suddenly kicking his back as he bent harder to it, now moving almost too fast, almost too hard, making it almost hurt, making her jerk up and cling to him and scream as the orgasm shook every, welcoming bit of her pussy, its clutch making him come as well with a moaning wail that would have frightened her.

If she hadn’t been so sated and felt so safe.

Turning so she lay on top of him, Adam wrapped her close to him and said nothing. For a long time. Kay waited, not sure if he was asleep, or regretting.

“I do have a regret, sweetheart,” he muttered against the top of her hair, his accent back to sharp and aristocratic. 

Oh. 

Of course. It was a heat of the moment thing. Well, she wouldn’t regret it. That was far and away the most thrilling sex she’d ever had and it was after something intimate and even if Adam wasn’t emotionally mature enough to know that she was. And she certainly wasn’t about to cry about it, because he’d made her feel very good indeed.

Not to mention she could picture the epic eyeroll that would earn her.

“I regret that I was such an asshole that I didn’t kiss you first,” he said, lacing his long fingers through her hair to tilt her head back. His eyes were closed, and his kiss was so gentle, so tender, that she did cry.

And not only did he hold her close to his chest and stroke her hair and let her cry for as long she liked, he didn’t roll his eyes a bit. 

  
  
  



	10. Mutual Jeopardy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam feeds Kay.

While she had cleaned up, Adam had washed a few glasses so Kay could start hydrating and gone up to the bookstore breakroom, coming back down with a half a box of Girl Scout cookies, a few slices of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a honey bear - which he frowned at in annoyance - and a box of tea. 

When she came out of the bathroom, having cleaned her arm, straightened her clothing, brushed her hair so it lay neatly in place, wiped off her glasses that had gotten rather smudged through everything, Kay was composed, her usual prim self. Other than being pale, with deep shadows under her eyes it might have been any other time she’d visited him, trying to get him to discuss ghosts and other supernatural bullshit, having to listen to records whilst he gave a pompous lecture series on Tesla, or Les Paul, or Mary Shelley. 

Now, she stood next to the table in his kitchenette, slightly wobbly, trying to act as if nothing untoward had happened between them.

Adam felt himself smiling, again, crossing his arms and leaning back against the sink. It felt so strange to smile after so long, not that he ever had much. What the fuck was there to smile at?

Well, he told himself, right now it was Kay fiddling with the bottom of her blouse, uncertain as to what to say or do to set things to rights between them. To pretend that she was sophisticated enough to let him drink from her, to let him fuck her, then to cry on his chest like a wounded child and behave with nonchalance about it all. 

He knew she wasn’t. He had known that even before he’d taken mouthfuls of her luscious blood. But it was adorable to him that she was going to try.

Straightening her shoulders a little and tilting up her chin, she started to speak, then had to clear her throat, “I, um, pardon me … there … I know that what happened here was … It was like two friends sharing a meal. Nothing more or less.”

Adam snorted.

She carried on, determined to salvage their friendship if it killed her.

“And I am sure that you would like to treat it as such, so if...” she frowned as he snorted again, rolling his eyes, but grinning as he did so. “What?”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t help but find it very distracting to know that you are standing there, giving this nice speech, in that demure outfit, but that under that cute skirt you’re pantiless and probably still at least a little wet. And exhausted.” 

He stood and pulled a chair out from the table, then took her by the shoulders and guided her down into it, “Now before you fall over off of that, you need water, and food, the only protein I could find up there was peanut butter, so it will have to do.” Taking a seat across from her, Adam leaned his chair back on two legs and crossed his arms, rocking slightly, rather more anxious than he liked being. 

Being practical, Kay may have blushed but she also immediately picked up a piece of the toast he had made by carefully holding a slice of bread over one of the two burners of his stove that worked, using a knife in place of a proper toasting fork. After slathering it with peanut butter that had so much sugar the smell of it burnt Adam’s nose, she ate in several rapid, bird-like bites, sighed, and scalded her mouth a little with too hot, very sweet tea.

After, picking up a cookie and nibbling it in the same little bites, she asked, her eyes down, “Are you reading my mind? Have you been doing it all along?”

“No. Not all along, and I’m not … reading your mind isn’t exactly...“ he let the chair drop forward so he could lean an elbow on the table and run a hand through his hair. “Um ... when I drink a person, directly from a person, I am very connected to them for a time. It’s empathetic, for one thing, but it's more than that. And if I remain physically close to them it gets strong enough that I can … intuit what is going on in their mind.”

Kay put down the cookie and leaned forward, “So vampires can-”

He shook his head, “Not all of us…” he refused to use that distasteful word, “All of us have sensitivities - to touch, mostly. We touch objects and can feel some of their history, some of us in great detail.”

Eve. Eve had been especially gifted with psychometry, made stronger by her age. There was a level of the world that she existed in that the rest of them were hardly aware of. 

The last thing he could bear to think of at that moment, when he was so aware of Kay, and of her eager curiousness and strange bravery and her bare little ass under that skirt that he hadn’t even seen yet, and that she was very tired and a touch nervous as to where they would go from here, was Eve. 

Words spewed out of him. “Others can … they can do other things … control some things, move even faster than I can, speak mind to mind. My … thing,“ he sounded like a loon, “is fairly rare, actually. You need to get some sleep.”

She frowned at him, “Are you alright? Are you flustered because we fucked?”

Adam knew his mouth was hanging open, so he shut it. “I am a little surprised that’s how you put it. C’mon,” he stood and offered his hand. 

Her hand was cool, almost cold, and his for a change was almost burning, and he led her back farther into the basement, where his bed was hidden by a carved, teakwood screen that had been a third wedding gift and one of the few things he had salvaged from those days. 

“I was raised in a house where euphemisms had no place. I normally love them for that reason, but the ones for sex are so especially stupid. Sleeping together is just wrong, even if you end up doing that afterward. Making love is … well, if that exists I’ve never experienced it. Screwing just puts an unpleasant image in my mind, as does balling and banging. Having relations is ridiculous, and having sex is too - Oh, my! How did you get _ that  _ down here?”

Having lived through eras of truly elaborate, massive beds, Adam did not find his bed especially notable, but he could feel Kay’s response to the scrollwork on the four posters, the carved and gilded headboard, and the size of it. “The same way I got the harpsichord in, in pieces, then I put them back together. This was easy compared to that! Getting it back in fucking tune was a goddamned nightmare.” 

Turning her to face him, he started unbuttoning her cardigan. It was the color of buttercups, with pink glass buttons shaped like roses. Normally he would hate it, or at least the idea of it. At the moment, touching its softness, he wanted to wrap it around his again throbbingly hard cock and jerk hard enough to hurt.

“What are you doing?” she asked, not quite backing away and not quite batting at his hands.

He stopped, one button halfway out of the hole, “Let’s say I’m not done feeding you yet. You did say you were touch starved.” He finished unbuttoning her and pushed the sweater off of her shoulders, and then, because he knew it would make her more comfortable, unbuttoned his own shirt and stripped it off.

There was a little gasp as she saw that he was already mostly healed, the wound Jean had left now no more than scratches. Lifting her hand, he could tell she wanted to touch them and wasn’t able to bring herself to, so he took it and pressed her palm over the marks, trying not to hiss in pleasure as her cold fingers burned through him.

While she marveled, he took the opportunity to unbutton her blouse. With the pixie collar undone, he could see the delicate hollow of her throat and her pretty neck. 

The next time he was going to bite her there, so he could feel her hot breath on him and cup those nice, full tits of hers.

“ _ There isn’t going to be a next time, you bastard, so fuck that thought right out of your head _ ,” he told himself even as he took her blouse off. Her bra was lilac satin, with lace. 

“I’m going to take this off,” he told her.

Swallowing, and not looking at his face, Kay nodded.

Her tits weren’t just big, they were gorgeous, with big, rather dark nipples, surprising for a blonde, and had the wonderful sag that would make them nice and heavy when he held them. Looking down at her, he took off her glasses. She still didn’t look up, and he just gazed at her for a little while, where her hair lay over her pale shoulders and those pretty breasts, and her eyelashes, dark with mascara, shaded her eyes from him, and the faint pink of her mouth. 

Renoir, an artist Adam normally found insipid, would have adored her.

“You are very beautiful,” Kay said, and for a moment, he wondered if she could read _ his  _ thoughts.

“So are you.”

“Thank you.”

Before taking off her skirt, Adam stepped out of his trousers, “I’m surprised you can take those off so easily, considering how tight they are.”

“Powers of the undead.”

Now, finally, Kay looked up from her stocking feet, her eyes wide, “Reall- oh, of course not.” 

That time he smirked a little, stopping her hand as it went to her hip to unzip her skirt, “No,” he unzipped it himself and gave a little tug so it came down over her full hips. The satiny lining of the tweed made a slithering sound as it fell. One of her arms crossed over those lovely tits, and her other hand fell to cover her mons, and she looked away again. 

Adam took a step back to enjoy the view of her, nude but for her creamy kilt socks. “Even like that, you look niminy-piminy.” Taking a knee he rolled down one stocking and then the other quickly, wanting to take his time, but Kay was starting to shake, like a horse in a lather with too much white around its eyes, ready to bolt. 

Adam even knelt gracefully, and Kay wondered if that was a vampire thing or if he had been so graceful before. It was probably both. He had probably been very graceful as a human and then so much more so between the vampire stuff and all of the decades he had to practice everything so he had perfect unconscious competence. Kay had always been fascinated by unconscious competence because it was something everyone had in little ways that they never noticed, like making themselves a cup of tea the way they wanted or how they moved around their workspace, and always struggled and beat themselves up about with other things. Her father moved so awkwardly through life, as did three of her brothers - Joel, Andy, and Will - that they never gave themselves the credit they deserved for the unconscious competence of those little things, like driving well, and making an omelette without ever getting  _ any _ eggshell in the mixing bowl, and, and, and…

Her brain was freaking out and running words and thoughts and she really, really did not want to be thinking about her family at the moment but she couldn’t calm herself down and since it was either let her brain or her legs run her brain it was.

Knees fidgeting, Kay gulped as Adam ran his hands from her hips down the outside of her legs, his long fingers and his big hands covering a lot of her rather thick thighs and knees and her sturdy, retail worker calves and her ankles and then the tops of her feet. 

There were calluses on his hands and the tips of those long, eloquent fingers, heavy and lightly rough. She could almost hear them on her skin. Could fingers be eloquent? Adam’s were, his touch was delicate and purposeful. There was something unbearable about not having been touched for so long and now being touched so thoroughly. Her nervous system was going crazy and either her bones were going to jump straight out of her skin or she was going to melt straight down to nothing. 

It felt so good that she couldn’t stand it.

“I, um, oh,” her eyes closed as he stroked back upwards, slowly, her muscles tensing and softening because it was too intense and felt so good, “I have always attracted men who are mainly interested in me because they aren’t very into sex or even, even just being close, and they think that’s me too. It’s not me. It’s not.” 

Internal babbling had become external, along with a blush that turned her whole body red.

“No, it’s very much not,” he said, not watching where he touched her. Now one of those hands rubbed slow circles from her belly button to just below her breasts that bounced a little when the side of his palm touched them. 

His other hand pressed into the small of her back, so she bowed a little forward and his licked from the top of her mons to into her navel. The smile that she could see cross his face was just a little hungry. No, very hungry. 

The healing bite started to throb and her pussy, that had become soaking wet without her noticing, so overwhelmed was the rest of her by that rasping, comforting, miserable, wonderful touching, throbbed in time with it.

Someone like Adam had unconscious competences that he probably never even needed to use any more, like saddling a horse or hitching up a carriage or, or, or…

He stopped, those long fingers now cupping her ass. They were big enough to cover it entirely. It had never occurred to Kay before how that could feel so … soothing, to have that part of her held so possessively there. Nuzzling against her belly, Adam’s sonorous, rich voice vibrated through her, making her blood and her clit tingle together, “Time to take you to bed.”

“I’m not at all sleepy,” she informed him.

There was a small chuckle that turned into a silent laugh, his shoulders shaking, and for a minute Kay felt rather small. 

“Fuck me, but I think it’s adorable how _nihil ad rem_ you get,” he said, standing up, so closely that his whole body scraped every nerve ending she had as he rose, and he had to catch her and hold her against him, she was shaking so hard.

When he had her on his big, so comfortable bed, he whispered, “Back to touching soon enough, but I’m fucking hungry again.”

Without thinking, she offered him her arm. For a moment there was shock on his beautiful face. Just shock, not tinged with annoyance or irritation, “No, love, no.” Taking her arm, he rubbed his hands all over it and kissed the wound, which though it was almost closed, stung a little and made her already peaked nipples hurt a little as they got tighter.

He kissed each of them as well, his beautiful, thin mouth sucking each in turn, his tongue circling and laving until Kay’s knees spread, and she found herself raising her hips and lowering them, for all intents and purposes humping the air, too far gone to be embarrassed now. 

When he slid down the mattress and put his face between her legs, Kay screamed a little, “I haven’t actually done anything, yet,” he said, amused and matter of fact.

“Er, sorry. I’ve just never, well, rather, no one has ever been down there, like that. What does it look like? Do I … am I clean enough? Is it strange that you look even more beautiful from there?  _ Is _ that strange?” She lifted herself onto her elbows to look down at his now bemused face.

“Goddamned zombie fuckboys…” he gritted out before licking her from front to back and she fell down hard enough to almost knock the wind out of herself.

For as fastidious as he had been drinking her, Adam was as messy eating her out. The sounds he made, and the sounds she made, both her mouth and elsewhere, as he licked deep, his tongue everywhere, then his fingers, those long, rough fingers, first one, then two, fucking and stroking places in her, while he licked and licked and then sucked and licked at her clit. All of the poetry and learning and vocabulary went straight out of Kay’s mind as she planted her feet and pushed harder against all of that and moaned and begged and when it was there and there and there and he found that perfect place of fingers and mouth working together he made her come twice before he crawled his way up her heaving, limp body to smile like a greedy boy who wanted more cake right down at her.

“Oh, my,” she whispered at the feel of Adam drawing her against him, her spine along his chest, her ass against his hard, very hot dick, gently humming in her ear until she slept.

The next eighteen or so hours were a little otherworldly even for Adam, as they slept and woke on and off, often times thinking they were asleep only to find themselves speaking, and then never feeling entirely awake, either. He touched her everywhere, sometimes softly, other times quite firmly, until she no longer shuddered and started to fall apart from it, but rather stretched and purred and wanted more.

“It’s a good thing tomorrow is my day off,” Kay muttered, her normally very distinct voice sleepy.

“Today,” Adam replied, his voice soft. “It’s closer to dawn than to midnight.”

“You know what I mean,” she sounded a little more awake and mildly exasperated, lifting her head from where she was burrowed in his bed. 

He felt himself smile. He couldn’t help it and didn’t want to. “You’re the one who normally chooses the oddest moments to be a pedant, love. Are you shivering?” After she had finished weeping against him and calmed herself, Kay had stumbled to his bathroom, which thankfully he kept working for Earl’s visits, since he hated to have to go upstairs to piss and would bitch at Adam endlessly if he so much as ran out of toilet paper. 

Laying her head back down, she yawned and nodded, he knew he should let her sleep, but there would only be so long that he would feel this way. That at some point sooner rather than later, either because of the passing of time or his ingesting other blood, his internal equilibrium would return and it would no longer feel like the surface of the world was tilted in her direction. When it happened his brain would roil with relief and guilt, depression and self-loathing. 

For now, he was too deeply enmeshed in the pleasure of her, of doing something as simple as getting up to get another blanket. He was rarely cold himself, though he liked the weight of the heavy quilt he used. 

“I don’t choose it, I can’t…” she yawned again, “I can’t help it. In my family, it's easier to be literal, to have as much information on the table as you can. Thank you,” she said when he added the extra cover before climbing back into the bed.

“You’re welcome.” Then, softly he added, nuzzling her pale hair and stroking her hip for his own comfort, knowing she had fallen asleep again, “I’m sorry, for everything. Past, and future.”

Then he slept himself, both needing it, and to make the night come faster.

When the store closed, Adam left Kay, who was sleeping again, the strangeness of everything still more than her body and mind were entirely adjusted to. He made certain he didn’t look at her, needing to start pulling away sooner rather than later. On his way up the backstairs, he called Kat.

“I need the rest of the supply. Tonight. I’ll pay double.”

She sounded harried, not just by his demand, “Sure. I’ll just go down to the cafeteria and pick up a couple of Starbucks cups of O negative. You want me to pick up a croissant for you, too?”

“Not O negative, I need A positive.”

“What? Why? You know what? I don’t even care, and I don’t know-”

He hung up on her and stopped at the door to the alley, placing his palm flat against the metal. 

If Jean was out there he couldn’t feel them. 

Pulling on his gloves, Adam tucked a stake of Brazilian ebony,  _ Swartzia panacoco _ , into the pocket he’d sewn into his leather jacket to hold it, and let himself out and sniffed the air. 

West. 

Jean, furious and still nauseated from the freshness of the blood they had gorged on, liberally mixed with grass and dirt, had only just risen from where they nested in an empty office building in what could laughingly be called the ‘downtown’ of the ridiculous village Adam had hidden his cowardly, pig ass in. 

They scurried down the side of the building, landing on the roof of a shorter one that abutted it, and stood, trying to catch Adam’s scent. One good thing about a smaller town, there were fewer odors to interfere with tracking.

No wonder Phillipe and Ava hadn’t been able to find him. Neither of them was able to even contemplate one of their kind living away from a proper fucking city. But Jean had themselves been born in provincial circumstances and so had thought to think further afield than merely Boston or Marseilles or Osaka, which were their ideas of small towns.

Jean hated Adam all of the more for making them remember - with fresh blood and college town bullshit - the misery of Uzes and the work it had taken, the grime and ugliness, to make enough money to make their way to Lyon, and then Paris. To be themselves. 

They stopped for a moment. Remembering being themselves, happily striding down the Boulevard du Temple to the Theatre Dejazet. Ready to throw kisses and roses at the sopranos and tenors alike, sitting with their claque to be admired by the confused and desiring throngs of theater patrons for their beauty and sense of style. 

Before Phillipe had found them. Before Phillipe had made them -

Memories are death, Phillipe had said. You can only be who you are now, or you might as well crawl into a grave and pull the stone over your own head, he had told Jean over and over in those early days, when they had wept and wanted to be free, before they had learned to love being shackled to the beautiful, cruel creature that mastered them, tried to remake them in the image of their former love, and then rejected them, now twisted and ruined, when it did not work.

Before Jean had freed themselves just enough to hate Phillipe but not enough to leave him.

Phillipe was right.

For the distraction of those memories meant they did not sense, nor even scent Adam, who came at them from behind the breeze. 

The pain of the wood entering their heart was not as great as the pain of the teeth ripping through their spine. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nihil ad rem - beside the point


	11. Temporary Solutions to Long Term Problems

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam has a drink, Kay takes a shower

Adam had known that the need to rip through Jean, to worry their flesh and bones with his fangs would be overwhelming, as it had nearly overwhelmed him in the park. Not because they had threatened him or even, entirely, that they had been a danger to Kay, though that would have been sufficient. 

But because of Eve.

Because no matter how hard Eve and he and those few others of their kind who followed their path tried to be civilized, to ignore the beastly part of their natures, Jean had played a part in the death of Adam’s mate and for that his need to rip them to shreds overcame sense or logic or even self-preservation.

Hence his need for A positive.

He spat again and again, hawking up deeply, using muscles he had not needed in centuries, knowing that his brain was playing tricks on him even as he would swear he could feel each thick, ropy drop of Jean’s decaying blood oozing down his throat all of the while burning like battery acid. 

His stomach was queasy for the first time in decades.

Fortunately disposing of the body of one of them that had been animate for over a hundred years after their human death was never very difficult. The older they were the more the lack of that animating force which kept them as they were caused them to turn swiftly into mummy-like husks or even less.

When Jean had their part in bleeding Eve out, so slowly, so utterly, nothing had been left of his beloved but a pile of something like ash.

And the blood itself, obscenely bright against his studio walls. 

When Adam had finally freed himself of the ropes they had bound him with while making him watch, getting away just before the police arrived, he’d first gathered a palmful of her dust. 

It was preserved now in the small bead he wore alongside the one she’d given him when they first married, as well as the one that she had worn herself. Those small baubles had been the only things she had saved from the life she had lived as a human. As a mother and an artisan in Delphi, a thousand years before the birth of the alleged Christ. 

Thinking of Eve, of all of that the world and he had lost with her dying, he wished that he had killed Jean more slowly, though Adam knew himself well enough to know that such a thing wasn’t in him. It never had been, even at his most savage. 

Yet he simply disposed of Jean’s few brittle bones and parchment flesh in the furnace of the building he had killed them on the roof of and felt nothing but a little relief that Kay was safe and more nausea from the bit of their blood he’d been unable to spit out. Feeling weak and clammy he leaned over, hands braced on his thighs and gulped air, hoping that it would make him belch since it could serve no other purpose. 

Above, a bit of black smoke marked the passing of Jean, born over two hundred years before into a world that was even now only slightly willing to consider welcoming someone like them, fell into bad company that used them for cruel purposes, lived a homeless wandered, and died far from even the evil shits they called family.

Adam saw none of it, swallowing bile as he staggered towards his car.

Fuck. He felt like garbage. 

On the way to the hospital he called Kat, hating to admit that Earl had been right about a cellphone being a good idea. “Do you have it?”

“Good evening to you, too, kind sir. Yes, I have  _ some  _ A positive, and you are going to have to be happy with what I give you. The rest is O neg as usual.”

Fuck, he cursed to himself. Still, he’d been careful and hadn’t taken in even as much as a mouthful from Jean’s neck, so he should be ok if he got it quickly. 

Thankfully the town was quiet that night, getting ready for Halloween the next, and he had driven long enough that muscle memory took the place of actual skill as he bit the back of his hand to keep from vomiting out of the window, knowing the acidy nature of it would ruin the finish on his Jag.

They met in the north stairwell of the parking garage. Kat was already there, stubbing out a cigarette on the payment machine. “Do you fucking believe they make us pay if there isn’t enough room in the employee parking lot? I swear to God, I’m going to start applying for jobs at iHop or something. At least I get free pancakes there. Here,” she thrust a white paper bag at him like she was handing him a burger and fries.

Inside were three canisters that probably had the O negative and four test tubes filled with blood. They had navy blue tops, so probably had no anticoagulants in them. “Should I ask?” he asked.

Kat shrugged as she counted the fold of bills he handed her. “Dickhead came in with a broken leg. He’s shit faced, but clean.”

“That seems … unethical, even for you.”

Adam scrambled around in the bag, tearing it a bit, pulling out one of the tubes and popping the cap with a thumb.

“Yeah, it’s very far from fucking ass ethical, as is the amount of times that dickbag brought in his wife after she ‘tripped.’ He won’t miss it. Did you catch that cute girl you were chasing? You know, the one with the -” she started to lift her hands in a gesture that either implied either big tits or rheumatoid arthritis when she recoiled, “Gross, dude, just gross.”

It had been ages since he’d drunk in front of a human, and now he’d done it twice in as many days. 

So to speak.

He ignored her and quickly finished the other three. Normally drinking what would have been his own blood type had he still been a zombie would have been even more of a high than even O neg, but with the sickness he was trying to fight it was just comforting.

“That was horrible. Really. Never do that in front of me again.” Kat said. “But, also, kind of hot. Your pupils are blown, man. I have to get back. But did you?”

Feeling himself for the first time all night, Adam responded irritably, “Did I what?”

“Catch her.”

The so very fresh memory of Kay’s blood - how delicious she had been, fresh and warm and salty-sweet followed by the lusciousness of sinking his prick into her and the day spent cossetting and fucking her - almost knocked him back down the concrete steps. “I’ll call you,” was all he said and then he was gone.

Kay woke up when she heard Adam close the door. 

Laying there for a few moments, staring at the ceiling, she wondered if it was ok for her to go home. Was it safe? 

She really wanted to go home. She wanted a long shower and to put on something soft and to sit in her chair by the window for a long time and think. For about twenty-four hours her life had been overwhelming, filled with sadness and terror and pain and lust that was for the first time completely satisfied - for the moment - and connection and even some humor.

She was not used to  _ any _ of that. 

Certainly not all at once.

Her mind needed a little while to cool down and her emotions were sore and exhausted because they hadn’t been used much, comparative to how much most people seemed to use theirs. Kay needed to center herself before going to work the next afternoon. 

And before what she knew was inevitably coming with Adam.

Scrambling around to find her clothing, she got dressed, borrowing a largish, grey pullover she found in a heap in the corner of the room to make up for her lost, ‘cool’ jacket. Her panties appeared to have been devoured by Adam’s monstrous piles of stuff. At least her purse was still on the coffee table, but her phone was dead and she very much doubted he had an extra charger around, since she’d seen him glare at the one he had for his own, very minimalistic, unsmart phone as if it were somehow responsible for the creation of auto-tune.

Dressed, hungry, and trying to not think too deeply about anything that had happened just yet, Kay stood awkwardly by the couch, not sure what to do with her hands, simply looking around, a little terrified of invading Adam’s precious privacy. 

There was no more food, and she knew she needed to eat something, and soon. 

He had a landline, she knew, but she wasn’t sure where and, again, the idea of rooting around for it seemed wrong.

So she stood, and jittered and worried about if he would be back soon, and if he wouldn’t.

Finally, going over to the desk where he had all of the surveillance of the store set up, she found a half-used pad of paper where the sheets had been roughly torn off, leaving bits of each leaf on along the top. It took her about two minutes to clean that up before she could start her note.

It then took her another two minutes to find a pen that wasn’t dried out, and then only because she reasoned he would have a few near his recording area for making notes.

_ Dear Adam, _

_ Thank you very much for your hospitality.  _

Kay crumpled that one up and put it in her purse right away, as she did with her next three attempts.

Finally, she came up with her wording, and it only took her four attempts to be comfortable with her penmanship. Which also seemed like a sufficient amount of time for Adam to call her on his landline or come back.

_ Dear Adam, _

_ I apologize for leaving without saying goodbye in person. Please feel free to call me when you have time.  _

_ Best, _

_ Kay _

  1. _I have borrowed a sweater. I will wash it or dry clean it as recommended before returning it to you. Thank you._



She left it on his hi-fi set, knowing that was where he usually headed first when he came home, putting a record on the spindle before anything else, made the bed, washed the few dishes she’d dirtied as well as his little sherry glass and let herself out, chewing on the last Do-si-do that she’d been happy to find still in the box.

Going through the drive-through at McDonald’s was still the most revolting thing Adam had done that night, and it put him in a grumpy mood. Grumpy, he recognised, even by his own standards, which is why when he found Kay gone, and her polite note, with her cute and precise handwriting, he promptly lost his shit.

That she had no way of knowing that it was safe, and Jean was no longer a threat, and that she fucking left anyway was beyond him. 

The greasy smell from the fast food was invading every corner of his space that had not been colonized by the scent of Kay’s blood. Of her pussy. Of her hair and skin and oh, fucking Christ he should be over this by now. Between the sickening, poisonous blood from Jean, and the A positive, and the O negative that he’s sipped more carefully in the privacy of his car after leaving the hospital, her essence should be nothing more than a faint ghost fading in his mental distance.

But, rather…

It was fine. He told himself. It was fine. It had been a very, very long time since he’d drunk from the well, and even longer since he’d drunk from a decent, kind, even interesting he had to admit, person. Of course, there would be more linger. It had been less than a day, after all. And she was safe, even if she didn’t realize it. 

He’d wait until tomorrow and visit the store. It was Halloween, he wouldn’t even have to cover his face and would just appear to have a very accurate AJ Clarke costume, if anyone cared. 

For the time being, he had other things to attend to, such as figuring out how Jean had found him, and if they had spread the word…

Firstly, though, he needed to get that foul-smelling burger out of his lair.

Grasping the bag and squeezing it closed like he could cut off its breath, Adam stalked back up the stairs. Outside the air was fresher, it being late enough that most of the car exhaust had settled to earth and the factories outside of town were quiet. Not that it was truly fresh, though he was one of the maybe few hundred or a thousand creatures old enough on earth to remember what genuinely fresh air was like.

As well as even fouler air - from burning bodies and open graves, from factories without any rules at all about what they could do to the skies or the water, from battlefields and open sewers and unwashed bodies living practically atop each other. 

He wondered if Kay had anything to eat at her apartment, or if she would feel up to making it as she was probably exhausted and then had to walk home.

He looked at the sack of food and hated the idea of wasting it. 

The buzz of her doorbell, sounding more like someone was leaning on it, could be heard over the sound of her shower. Kay wrapped herself in a towel and carefully stepped out of the tub, since she was a bit lightheaded. The 70s era security system in her small building still worked, and she could see Adam standing outside, one finger holding the button down, his sunglassed eyes staring a hole into the camera, his face at once blank and annoyed.

Oh. 

He was very, very handsome, she noticed for the first time. Beautiful and handsome. They were two different things and he was both of them which seemed very unfair since she really wasn’t ready to see him yet.

“One minute. Um, I mean three,” she said into the intercom.

Pulling on sweats and a heavy, corduroy shirt that she wore on cleaning day, she quickly wrapped her hair in a towel and then let herself take a long breath before going down. “Hello, Adam.”

He scowled at her. “I would say that you were a goddamned idiot for leaving before I told you it was safe, but since you’re what passes for a grown woman here, I didn’t want it to go to waste.” A rather large white paper bag with two quarter pounders and some fries was thrust in her face.

“Thank you. I’m making soup, heating it up actually, but thank you.” 

“That’s probably a better choice. I … nothing was open other than fast food.”

Kay hated McDonald’s.

But she would have killed for some Taco Burrito King.

They stood, looking at each other, each a little jittery.

Then they both spoke.

“I should go.”

“I don’t expect anything.”

“What?” Adam said, sliding his sunglasses off and into his pocket.

“I don’t expect anything. Of you. Of us.” Kay had thought the whole walk home and in the shower about what she would say and while she thought she’d have a little more time to refine her words, she didn’t. 

“I know that it was exceptional circumstances. All of it. Us being attacked, and you needing to feed that way, which I could tell by your tone of voice that you didn’t like, and how that led to what happened. I actually feel like I sort of took advantage of you.”

“You didn’t,” he whispered but she kept right on talking because now she couldn’t stop, the words falling out of her the way she needed them to so she could get through them all.

“Not intentionally, of course. And it was wonderful, it was just everything I wanted and needed and thank you for that. For how you were and how lovely. And you are welcome, of course, for what I gave you in return. If anything crazy like that happens again, we know that we can just, ah, do that all again and it would be fine. Also,” she slowed down a little and smiled, which only took a little effort, “I feel like whatever disagreement we were having before this is probably silly in retrospect.”

There. 

Done.

She almost believed it herself. Well, she did believe it in as far as it was what she needed if she was to survive the memory of what happened between them. 

A look that Kay could only read as relief crossed Adam’s face, followed by his habitual slight annoyance.

“You aren’t wearing any shoes,” he muttered. “And your hair is wet, and your immunity is going to be down for a few days. You should go up.”

“My soup will probably be boiling over, too. I haven’t had time to clean the sweater yet, needless to say.”

“Yes. Needless.”

She considered offering him her hand to shake, since he was wearing his gloves so it would be safe for both of them. Anything to get him to leave. 

She very, very much needed him to leave.

Instead, she nodded, “Thank you again, for the burgers. That can’t have been pleasant for you.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

He was gone before she finished closing the door.

That day, no sooner had he fallen asleep, Adam had a nightmare of sorts, where he was trying to compose a fantasia for theremin and glass harmonica. 

That day, just before sundown, the man who had once been Christopher Marlowe, had a dream. When he woke up with a start, holding the place where the dead pump that had once been his heart was, he expected to feel it thudding through his chest.

“Master?” said the latest lovely young fellow to share his bed and take care of things for Kit, his tousled head rising from a sea of pillows, his tight little ass still a bit pink from the night before, the fang marks on the inside of his thigh almost entirely healed. “Is something the matter?”

Marlowe rubbed his hands down his face to compose himself. When he was calmer, he leaned over and gave him a fond but distracted kiss on the bum, “Perhaps, Nekhii, perhaps. Now up, I need you to look into flights for me. I’ve had a message from a very dear, very old friend. She is worried about her husband and she cannot get a hold of him, so I promised I would go.”

“But you hate to travel, master.”

“So I do, yet I have a debt to be paid, and sweet Titania needs me to seek her Oberon, so seek him I shall.” 

He added where he needed the flight to, all at night obviously, with the fewest stopovers possible. Fucking airports worked his last nerve.

“Who are these people?” Nekhii yawned, and padded naked to his laptop to start looking at flights, whilst putting on his headset. “Titania and Oberon? Shakespeare, yes.”

Marlowe stretched across the bed and picked up the leather case he kept his cigarettes in and lit one, lounging back. “Shakespeare, yes. Poor Will. How I have maligned him over the centuries, from purest, blackest jealousy. That the gods blessed the pen of a mere mortal, a middle-class mere mortal at that, was more than my vanity could stand.”

“What, master?” Nekhii asked, lifting one of the earpieces.

Kit laughed, “Nothing my dear boy, nothing. Find me that flight, and then get ready, we’re going to need to shop for my trip.”

  
  
  
  



	12. Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Halloween.

_ They stood, looking at each other, each a little jittery. _

_ Then they both spoke. _

_ “I should go.” _

_ “I don’t expect anything.” _

_ “What?” Adam said, sliding his sunglasses off and into his pocket. _

_ “I don’t expect anything. Of you. Of us.” Kay had thought the whole walk home and in the shower about what she would say and while she thought she’d have a little more time to refine her words, she didn’t.  _

_ “I know that it was exceptional circumstances. All of it. Us being attacked, and you needing to feed that way, which I could tell by your tone of voice that you didn’t like, and how that led to what happened. I actually feel like I sort of took advantage of you.” _

_ “You didn’t,” he whispered but she kept right on talking because now she couldn’t stop, the words falling out of her the way she needed them to so she could get through them all. _

_ “Not intentionally, of course. And it was wonderful, it was just everything I wanted and needed and thank you for that. For how you were and how lovely. And you are welcome, of course, for what I gave you in return. If anything crazy like that happens again, we know that we can just, ah, do that all again and it would be fine. Also,” she slowed down a little and smiled, which only took a little effort, “I feel like whatever disagreement we were having before this is probably silly in retrospect.” _

_ There.  _

_ Done. _

For the nights between their parting at the doorway to her apartment building and Halloween, Adam did not see Kay.

Not that he needed to, or even had planned on it, but more than he was comfortable with admitting, Adam was a creature of habit. Those habits were mostly solitary of course. They involved him doing little more than moving between his rooms, playing and tuning his guitars, making notes on compositions that he never managed to finish, setting a new record on the spindle, reading while vaguely missing having a brandy while he turned the pages despite it having been so long he didn’t remember what it tasted like, and once or twice a month looking about him and wondering if maybe he was a little disorganized.

But Kay had become part of those habits, in her own, small way, sitting on his couch, reading, whilst trying to mentally frame questions about the supernatural in a way that wouldn’t leave him annoyed and disgruntled. 

Her scent was still everywhere. It had been there before, but now so much stronger. Intense. Bloody. Her wet mixing with his spunk. 

Even though he was exhausted, he’d had to drag himself to strip his bed and throw the sheets and blankets in the furnace, and then sprayed Lysol on everything. Even then he moved to the couch and was finally able to rest without rolling over and racking his erection or waking up with a mouthful of pillow that he’d shredded with his aching fangs. He was going to have to buy a new mattress, and the thought exhausted him further.

After dark he still was only able to lay on the couch until dawn, not moving save to have a few sips of blood, his Martin 16 series held to his chest. Once or twice he’d done a bit of blues fingering, it’s warm tone not as comforting as he’d hoped it would be. Mostly he’d stared at the homemade soundproofing on the ceiling, thinking about Eve.

He knew that she would forgive him. It was not in her to care about a little physical infidelity. She’d lived in France too long for that. 

_ Just a little fucking, darling, _ she would whisper in his ear.  _ Certainly, it was unfortunate that you were forced to eat from her directly, but she consented and you had no choice. Jean was such an asshole _ . 

Then she would give him an impish smile, adding, “ _ And I _ have  _ been dead for several decades…” _

Closing his eyes against the pain, Adam did not move until he felt the sun starting to tease the earth. Rolling over, unable to face his bed again, he buried his face in the dusty velvet and didn’t move again until dark. 

He felt better the next night, which made him feel worse. But it allowed him to get back to more half-assed attempts at finishing a composition, tuning instruments that didn’t need to be tuned, playing records that he only half-heard, and in a general way keeping everything stale.

Once or twice while he was at it Adam had happened to look at the monitors to see what was happening in the store. Being deep into the university’s fall semester, as well as those last few weeks before the entire state turned into what it called a ‘winter wonderland’ - because ‘Cocytus, but with snowboarding,’ wasn’t as fucking marketable - meant it was busy most of the time. At the end of the night, Kay and one of the part-timers who tried to follow him a few times had to all but push the last of the time-wasters out the door.

Then, after the part-timer left and she finished the deposit, he watched as she opened the storage under the shop windows, crawling in with a flashlight to find the Halloween decorations.

Earl had always been against decorating for the holidays. Before Kay had started working there he’d hung a few strands of fairy lights and put the cheapest wreath he could find on the door at the last possible minute, all in the most begrudging and sullen manner possible. 

After a year working in the store, Kay had taken over the decorating, twisting Earl’s arm so she could dip into the petty cash. He had finally agreed that she could do more as long as it was for a shorter period of time. 

Adam had been doing an appraisal - a five-volume French edition of Les Miserable, privately bound in the early 20th century - when the subject of other holidays came up.

The idea of decorating for Halloween was beyond Earl. “I buy fucking candy, goddamn it. The good shit, too. Full-sized chocolate bars.”

Kay had nodded patiently, “Yes. And we should get something for the children that can’t eat candy. Skull rings are nice. Or maybe rats. Rats are nice.”

Earl’s response had been deeply profane.

Adam had told him later not to be a cheapskate. 

“Didn’t you tell me that Halloween was filled with images that offend your delicate sensibilities, blood-sucker?” Earl had jeered.

“Just do it,” Adam had pulled out a roll of bills and tossed a few at his partner. “Or you can just stand in the fucking window. Your face is scary enough on its own.”

Carefully not looking at the cameras, Kay hung skeleton and ghost lights, rubber bats, and other nonsense, stopping only to untangle Cobweb from a ball of fake spiderwebs he’d managed to get himself snarled in. She finished at midnight, letting herself out without a backward look.

The night after that he crawled under his desk and pulled out all of the cords for the monitors, detangled them, dusted, and even got rid of the balled up paper, broken drumsticks, guitar picks, pens, and other shit that had ended up there over the years. It took him hours, so by the time he finished the store was closed.

The next day Kay was scheduled to work until seven, but when he checked she wasn’t there.

Or the next. 

Adam left the building by the back door and climbed onto the roof. Even though the building was only two stories, it was high enough that he could get a good, hard sniff. There were the usual fossil fuels and plastic, the distinctive odors of the two lakes, myriad trees, dogs, humans, some healthy, some dying, and all of the stages between, buildings made of everything from wood to poured concrete, leaf fires, pizza, sewage, and dirty puddles. All of the typical smells of a mid-American college town.

Nothing odd.

Nothing unnatural. Other than himself.

Not that he would have for certain smelled another of his kind if they were farther away than a few blocks, or if they were clever and cautious enough to find a way to mask their scent, and fuck knew that Phillipe was more than clever enough, and cautious when he bothered to take a half a second to consider his actions. 

But even assuming Phillipe had reasoned out where Jean had disappeared to and what had happened to them, he would never come himself this quickly. He would throw a few underlings on the fire first, to feel things out, or perhaps even take a shot at him. Trying to think like Phillipe and giving himself a headache in the process, Adam knew that he would send Ava, thinking she would get under his skin.

She would, but not in the manner Phillipe would assume. When he looked at Ava he saw a failed version of Eve, close enough to haunt him, never enough to satisfy, and he’d always assumed that Adam saw that as well when nothing could be farther from the truth.

When he looked at Ava all he saw was a migraine and a small, neatly kept bed-sit in Paris, with a geranium plant on the sill of the one window and a little dog waiting patiently for the frail, gentle pianist who lived there. Whose bloodless body Adam had weighed down with red bricks and dropped into the Seine, whilst Eve helped her sister pack for an abrupt trip to Genoa.

Though he knew he would regret it, Adam called the store.

The other part-timer who used to like to try and follow him answered, using Earl’s chosen greeting, “Flitcraft’s. If we don’t have it, don’t tell us you can get it on Amazon. How can I help you?”

“Yeah, hi. This is…” For a moment he almost gave his actual name rather than the one he used for appraising in the store, “...Jon Grolier, I was hoping to speak to Kay.”

There was a small gasp and then the sound of a heartbeat, as if a phone were being muffled against a chest, and he could hear a gaspy whisper, “The Antiquarian guy is on the phone for Kay. I told you they were. I  _ told _ you.” Then, into the phone itself, “I’m sorry, but Kay isn’t here tonight.”

“She’s on the schedule,” he objected before he could stop himself.

More muffling, more whispering, “He. Knows. Her.  _ Schedule _ !” 

For. Fuck’s. Sake!

“Um, yes, but she wasn’t feeling well,” she told him. “I’m sure it's nothing serious, if you want her number.”

Now completely irritated, Adam snapped, “Are you supposed to be giving out personal information on the staff there?” He started to hang up but first added, for no good reason, “I have her number.”

The next night was one of her days off and then it was Halloween.

When Adam woke up and rolled off of the sofa he could see Kay on the monitor that showed the desk. There was a neatly carved jack-o-lantern with a goofy face at her elbow, and she was wearing a little black dress with long sleeves and a witch’s hat, the same as every year. Though looking closer he could see the hat was new.

She was handing out Three Musketeer bars to a pair of teenagers dressed like movie zombies. 

How meta, Adam snarked to himself.

Listening hard he could hear Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. Not exactly innovative, but at least it wasn’t ‘Thriller’ or ‘Monster Mash.’

He waited until the trick or treating hours were over before going upstairs.

The parents had scurried the younger kids home so they could go through their candy before it was greedily eaten to the point of sickness, the older kids had gone home to watch horror movies and try to scare each other, and the students had gone to the clubs and bars that were having Halloween parties. The store was nearly empty. 

Kay told Marco to leave. He was dressed as “a 1980s era rockabilly, specifically,” and was going to a costume contest at the last old school gay bar in town with his boyfriend, who was dressed as Melania Trump. Except with facial expressions.

“Those aging queens  _ love _ drag and politics, so he’s gonna win,” he’d said with a shake of his head. “But then again, a lot of them got their first boner to the Stray Cats, so I might have a chance.”

As Marco walked out, Adam walked in. From behind him, she could see her co-worker pointing at his back, and then giving her an intense smirk.

She flipped him off.

“Sorry?” Adam said, more confused than offended. “You look really fucking weird making that gesture.”

“It wasn’t meant for you. Your sweater is at the dry cleaners,” she said, trying for cheery normality.

From the look on Adam’s face he had not only forgotten she had his sweater, he seemed a bit surprised that he had ever had a sweater. Thinking about it, a pull-over, or god forbid a cardigan, didn’t really match his overall, rock and roll/crazed loner aesthetic. Indeed, it was borderline impossible to imagine him buying such a thing. 

He stood across the counter from her. In the other room she could hear Cobweb give an almost bored hiss, and there was a thump as he jumped down from wherever he was sleeping, making the wooden floor creak under his solid little body, and the sound of his claws clicking as he slowly ambled to a hiding place. Apparently Adam had been in the store enough that even the cat no longer objected to his predator smell.

Her feet fidgeted on the foot rest of the tall chair she sat on by the register. She finally hooked the heel of her new boots over it to make herself stop.

She waited, not quite looking into his eyes.

Adam waited, taking off his sunglasses and looking over her right shoulder.

Pavane for a Dead Princess faded out as the spooky classical playlist ended and the spooky blues playlist started with Bessie Smith’s Haunted House Blues. Adam gave her a grudging look of approval. There was a little jump that her heart did when he gave her that look, a raised eyebrow with a matching half smile, that made her rather angry with herself. His approval, anyone’s approval, shouldn’t matter to her. 

Especially Adam’s, Kay told herself. 

She wished very much he would leave. She had been fairly certain he would avoid her for a week or two. Maybe longer if he didn’t need to come in for an appraisal. Maybe even until Earl came back and she could start working days more.

“Are you alright?” he asked with an abruptness that took the place of what might have otherwise been concern.

“Why?” That he was potentially concerned made her feel things. Things that she would later need time alone to consider.

“The other one who was working for you the other night-”

“Genie,” she said in a tone that said, ‘you know her name is Genie.’

“Yes, then, Genie,” he said with a verbal eyeroll, “said that you weren’t feeling well.”

Kay folded her hands on the countertop and thought about if she should have a candy bar to make herself look more casual. “No, she misstated, or misunderstood. I went to see my doctor, and my gynecologist, for full check-ups. Blood work, urinalysis, physical, pap smear. It was a long day and I knew I wouldn’t want to come in afterwards.” 

“Um-”

She could see a series of questions wanting to fall out of his normally reticent mouth. There was an audible gritting of teeth on his part, even as he tried to pretend that he was utterly disinterested. It was at once endearing and insulting. 

Sadly, Kay found everything about Adam either endearing or insulting, so despite her having been raised by her mother to only give out information that had been overtly solicited - and then, per the example of her father, to gush out everything a person might want to know and so much more - she took pity on him.

Looking out the window, she said, “Since I had just had a wide variety of sexual and non-sexual fluid exchange with a man who has been largely dead in several senses for a very long time I thought I was better off being safe than sorry.”

Her hands unfolded and then refolded themselves without her guidance as she looked back at him. Offense flickered and died in Adam’s eyes, followed by a respectful nod and that considering thing he did with his mouth on the rare occasion he was caught off-guard. In a human it would look like he was trying not to cry or laugh. 

But he wasn’t human, and had not been for so very long, and she had to remember that.

“What did they find? I mean, did they find anything?” He sounded wary.

“I need to get a soft bristle toothbrush.”

“What?” 

Was it wrong that she liked that she had confounded him a bit? 

“I went to the dentist while I was at it. To check for unusual canine activity. I should switch to a soft-bristle, electric toothbrush. Otherwise I am in perfect heath. It seems  _ all  _ of your fluids are sterile."

Sitting at the dentist had been the only part of her day that hadn't been mentally mortifying. The entire time she was at Dr. Speedwell's and even moreso at Dr. Aveer's, terrified not so much at what they might find as what they might ask.

What could she say? Yes, the penis in question was several centuries old but it was remarkably well preserved and the blood that made it erect was her's anyway, so shouldn't that be safe?

“Well, that’s a relief," he said, actually sagging a little.

“Wait, you didn’t kno-”

Before she could finish the rather uncomfortable thought that she was having, the bell on the door rang as a customer came in. There was a wave of cool, wet air, smelling of dying leaves and smoldering pumpkins. 

Adam turned, snarling, his fangs descended, his body tensed. Then he made a sound like a confused wolf. 

The two men in the doorway looked ill-matched. The younger was beautiful, with deep amber skin, thick, fashionably cut black hair, and pale green eyes. He was dressed in a heavy sweater, jeans, and a parka and still looked like he was freezing.

The older man was thin and intensely pale, but strong looking. He wore an expensive suit with a multicolored, satin brocade vest, and carried a carved, black-stained walking stick that he did not seem to need. It’s copper cap tapped lightly on the floor. 

His hair was grey, and rather more like a mane than anything else, coarse and feral, and his eyes where they peered with amusement over his sunglasses, with the little round frames that would be forever associated with John Lennon. “Pardon me,” he was English, with an amused, not-quite aristocratic voice, “do you by any chance have the collected works of Christopher Marlowe? And if not, can I interest you in purchasing a  _ very _ rare set?”

  
  
  



	13. Oh, Dear.  Oh, My Very Dear.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kay meet Adam's past.

Adam was torn between a moment of rare happiness at seeing someone from his past and an as real fear about what it meant for Marlowe to show be on his doorstep.

It had to be extremely bad to get Marlowe to travel to the US.

It had to be some  _ very _ serious shit for him to come to the Midwest.

Though he was frozen, Kit was not and was in the door and striding with surprising vigor and no help towards him. And because Flitcraft’s was a place of business open during business hours he could enter uninvited without fear of what Adam thought of as feedback. Their kind had vast freedoms compared to the zombies, not just from age natural death, so as a kind of counterweight to that there were things that were nothing to a zombie that were proscribed for them. Breaking them always had an effect. A bounceback. Always unpredictable in both what happened and how bad it was. 

Eve called it  _ infortunium _ , which made him want to give her a hard shake. That a being of her vast intellect and depths of knowledge should be as superstitious as the worst of their own kind  _ and _ the most ignorant of the zombies irritated him. 

Output was being distorted and returned as input, perhaps on a subatomic level, nothing more. 

“Yes, my darling,” she had responded, giving him that knowing smile that said, ‘I am a thousand years older than you and have seen some shit.’ “But _ what  _ is returning it to us?”

He had grumbled about how if their kind could be troubled to do a little actual research on themselves - controlled, quantifiable, qualifiable, science-based research - they might be able to answer those questions. With a sigh, she had rested her head in his lap, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…” Then she had given him a mischievous smile, “Kit once told me that if he’d had known you then Hamlet would have been even-”

He’d stopped her with a kiss. There was little Adam hated more than talking about his famed gloominess, which everyone seemed to romanticize. 

_ Of course he was gloomy. Everyone should be gloomy. Wasn’t  _ anyone _ else paying attention?  _ Adam had grumbled more than once. 

But now he could feel Eve’s mouth on his. Kit’s voice after all of these years did it to him. It was as if she were pressing her thin, pallid lips to his, her hands on his shoulders, the pressure of her fangs against his own as well, making them extend and ache.

Unconsciously he lifted a hand, as if she were there and he could pull her closer.

Like the keen pains caused by a phantom limb, his dead heart hurt so fucking bad right then Adam thought he was going to fall over. 

But he did not because Kit, being Kit, ignored his facade of reticence, and took that raised hand as an invitation, wrapping his skinny arms about Adam and pressing his face to his shoulder, “Oh my dear, my very dear,” he whispered. “Seeing you brings her back for me as well. Our fairy queen…our clever mistress...” 

Kit’s tears rolled down the leather sleeve of Adam’s jacket.

One tear fell from Adam and disappeared into Kit’s grey mane.

“What are you doing here?” he whispered back, not trying to disentangle himself, telling himself he was allowing himself to be held.

“Phillipe. He’s so close to finding you.” Marlowe still held on, but leaned his head back so Adam could get a look at him.

The creature that Adam had known for so long, Eve’s most beloved friend, her dear gossip, was no longer a frail shadow. The Marlowe Adam had known had been stooped and frail with corruption after spending decades drinking the diseased blood of whatever zombie had taken his fancy. So sickly that even years of Eve’s care along with feeding clean had not restored him. But now something had. Before him was the Kit of the time of Elizabeth I - the spy as well as the poet, and the tavern brawler known for a swift knife more than brutal fists, but capable of putting the boot in as well. 

Restored, with gleaming fangs.

Kit gave him a cruel smile. “He’s close to finding you, and you know Ava won’t be far behind. And when they come for you, my gentle maestro,” he lifted one of Adam’s bare hands in both of his gloved ones, and kissed the backs of his fingers, “I shall pay them back each five hundredfold for that irreplaceable she that they have taken from us. And who might you be, pretty lambkin?” 

Marlowe’s voice grew flirtatious and Adam blinked, suddenly remembering where and when they were. 

Kay had come from around the counter and was standing a few feet from his side, her witches hat set aside, concern drawing her brows down and tightening her pink lips so they had gone pale. “I can see that you and Adam are friends, which means it is probably ok for you to hug him, but you should always ask before touching another person.”

Now that she was on the other side of the counter Adam could see that the skirt of her little black dress was very short even for her, and she had bought a pair of biker boots to wear with it, since he was certain she had never owned anything like them before.

The rudeness of his sudden hard-on pressing into his old friend’s side would have made him blush if he’d had enough blood for both ends of his body.

“Goodness, my lord. I expect that’s for this melliferous wench and not your humble servant, Kit?” Marlowe laughed in his ear before disentangling himself, turning with the grace of a man trained in both the sword and the stage, and offered Kay a bow, “My pardon, dear proprietrix, you are of course correct. I am like to forget the changing mores of these  _ temporibus _ , as it were. Moreover, ‘tis most terribly rude of me to come into your place of business, accost a fellow consumer, and not introduce myself. Christopher Marlowe, late of Tangier and later still of Canterbury, at your most lovely service,” he said, no doubt expecting her to think he was joking, or that his parents had a strange sense of humor, rather than knowing the truth.

Quashing the smile threatened to curl up the right corner of his mouth, Adam watched Kay’s face go through a number of emotions, like a fruit machine rolling until it settled on outrage.

“You most certainly did NOT write the Shakespeare plays!” she said in that emphatic way that was her substitute for yelling, since raised voices were not allowed when she was growing up, because they upset her father. Then, she looked away, straightened her skirt, and met Kit’s eyes again and added with great politeness, “I love your translation of Ovid. Welcome to Flitcraft’s.”

Adam couldn’t help it.

When he saw the look on Kit’s face he smiled so wide his mouth hurt.

After that everything happened rather quickly. 

Starting with Adam being clearly embarrassed and annoyed with her.

Kay might have been a little embarrassed by her outburst herself, but she wasn’t about to take it back, even when Christopher Marlowe choked out a laugh, which led to a spate of French from the very beautiful young man he’d come in with. Which had led to introductions. 

“Nekhii, this is my most dear friend Adam, and his apparently dear friend...?”

“Kay Adams,” she said, unable to keep from offering her hand, “Mr. Marlowe.”

The man, who looked young and old at once, not so much ageless as Adam but clearly out of his time, threw his head back and laughed. “Mr. Marlowe! Mr. Marlowe! What a prim little armful, you! No, any friend close enough to Adam that he has revealed our little secret to you must call me Kit, or if your manners will not allow that, then plain Marlowe. But never Christopher. Or that will make me bite.”

He had leaned his head down so he could peer at her over his little, round glasses. Like Adam, he had lupine eyes. 

“Adam, Ms. Quinn, my close friend Nekhii Gamal, who speaks many languages exceptionally well, English included, though he prefers to pretend he does not.”

Smiling at Marlowe, the young man had stepped closer, taking Kay’s hand when Kit did not, giving it a warm shake, “I often find,” he said in very refined, London accented English, “that it helps to be underestimated when one is beautiful. Most people consider it unfair to be both lovely and intelligent, so my stumbling over their language makes them feel both superior and generous.” 

Not being able to remember the last time she had touched skin to skin with someone alive, Nekhii’s hand practically burned her. His pale, amber eyes were much lighter than his dark skin, making them glow, but they were entirely human which made Kay feel if not safer a little less outnumbered.

“Nekhii is as modest as he is decorative,” Marlowe said fondly. “He is possibly even more beautiful than our fair jongleur,” he added, gesturing to Adam. 

Kay thought that was true, but he was not as handsome, she mentally added out of loyalty.

Adam frowned and started to say something when Kay found herself blurting out, still angry - “O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. You did write that!” Then she added, “It’s very pretty.”

“Kay!” 

She’d never heard Adam yell before. 

She turned to look up at where he loomed over her, his feral hair looking more than ever like a cartoon rain cloud over the head of an unhappy character, except now with lightning cracking through it.

The cartoon cloud, not his actual hair.

“Well, it is pretty!” she shouted back into his face. It felt pretty good to yell at Adam.

“That wasn’t fucking the fucking iss-” he stopped himself, running his fingers deep into his mane and giving a good tug, then turned to Marlowe, “Kit? Where are you staying?”

The amused poet waved an airy hand, “Nekhii rented us a house. Surprisingly affordable and not far from here.”

“And I still need to go hang the blackout curtains and see to our luggage, but I wanted to meet the famous Adam that my master likes to go on about first.” Nekhii bowed to Adam, rather than shaking hands, and then gave a cheeky, flirty grin, “ _ Lover’s Walk  _ was my favorite cd growing up,” he said, citing A.J. Clarke’s most popular album, the only one to break the Billboard Top 100.

Kay had read the three books written about Adam’s former life as a rockstar and his disappearance, as well as more than a dozen magazine articles, newspaper clippings, and had visited any number of websites - from those for fans of 90s indie rock to conspiracy theory sites that had some crazy ideas about what had happened to AJ Clarke, but none so crazy as the truth.

“I could use a little bit of a native guide, actually,” he added, looking significantly at Kay, his body leaned slightly forward. He smelled warm and faintly of sandalwood. 

Before she could defer until the store closed in twenty minutes, Adam frowned again. “I’ll go. Kay, when you close up can you take Kit down to my place? Kit,” he turned to his old friend, who was amused by something going on but Kay could not imagine what, “feel free to take your gloves off. C’mon,” he jerked his chin toward Nekhii and started toward the door. Then, turning back, he aimed a finger like a pistol at Marlowe’s heart, “You can take your gloves off, but no touching Kay.”

Offended, she put her hands on her hips, “That’s not for you to s-”

But Adam and the other man were gone.

Marlowe laughed, “Oh, lambkin, what have you done to our Adam?”

Kay frowned, “Nothing.” Then she blushed. “Nothing much,” she amended.

He laughed louder, in Elizabethan.

Kay decided to worry about balancing the drawer later and just stuffed the cash drawer in the big, walk-in safe that was left in the office from the store’s origins as the college’s credit union in the late 19th century. So large was it at one point Earl had considered using it as a department for the vintage dirty novels and old porn magazines that he’d bought over the years and never figured out how to merchandise. But it would have involved remodeling the store and moving the various strata of detritus that had accumulated in his office over the years, so it never happened.

Marlowe accumulated a stack of books, gave her an address in Tangiers to send them to, and told her to bill Adam for them.

He was delighted by the door behind the bookcase.

He was mildly surprised at the state of Adam’s lair. “Honestly, I was expecting worse. But I suppose he hasn’t been here very long yet.”

Kay perched nervously on the edge of the velvet sofa, her knees together, holding the brim of her witch’s hat as Marlowe prowled about the place. He’d pulled his gloves off and left them on the little, black lacquered, Chinoiserie table Adam kept beside the door for his own gloves. 

Now and then he would touch an instrument, or run a finger down a book spine, his eyes closed in reverence or unholy glee, smiles and frowns flickering briefly over his features, like pages being flipped.

“I feel as if I should be interrogating you as to the state of our Oberon,” Marlowe said, then looking up at the ceiling, he amended, “perhaps Hades,  _ Rex Silentum _ , might be more appropriate these days. A Prosperina rather than a Titania sharing his gloomy land...”

Before Kay could object, or compliment his Latin pronunciation, he was gone, headed to the bedroom. 

She chased after him, scurrying so she didn’t knock anything over, worried he might  _ smell  _ her in there.

“I know Adam said you could take your gloves off and whatnot, but you probably shouldn’t be-”

A little nervous being back here, Kay found herself looking around, feeling shifty, as if she were the one doing something wrong. There was something off about the room….

Hands on his hips, he surveyed the walls. “I know it's in here. Not even he would neglect such a treasure, nor trouble to have it far from his eye.…” He ran his hands along the corners of the wall that faced Adam’s bed, stooping and standing on his toes.

Kay stared at the bed. The hangings were gone, as were the pillows and blankets, which could just mean they were being cleaned, but something more important was missing as well 

“Where’s the mattress?”

“Ah! We have joy!” the poet called out. “Would you care to do the honors, as you are mine hostess, even if but temporarily so?”

Before she could ask what he was talking about Marlowe, ignoring Adam’s wishes, grasped Kay’s sleeves and pulled her over to the corner where he pointed out a small inconsistency that looked for all of the world like a handle. Looking up and around, squinting and glad she’d gotten a new prescription recently, she could just make out what looked like a fine crack all around the top and bottom of the wall. 

Tapping with her knuckles, there was a slightly hollow sound. 

“I’m guessing it slides like a pocket door,” Kit said with glee. “There is clearly a great deal of unaccounted for space on the other side of that wall,” he pointed to the wall beside the bed. 

Kay hated to intrude on Adam’s business. It was impolite … really. Very, very rude.

The false wall moved easily enough. Clearly Adam either hadn’t thought anyone would find it or, just as likely, had vastly underestimated the strength of a typical human.

Stale air and dust blew out at her, and she choked and took her glasses off to clean them, while Kit stepped forward and pushed it the rest of the way open.

As it slid to the side, Marlowe made a grunting noise and was at her next to her before it stopped moving. “Oh … mistress mine…” he whispered, his voice filled with sad wonder.

The wall was covered in images, photos, and reproductions of paintings, some framed and hung properly, some thumbtacked in place. Some Kay recognized right away. There was Tesla, naturally, for Adam was always talking about him, Dickinson, Poe, Yukio Mishima, Mary Wollenstonecraft, Bruce Lee, several members of the Wu-Tang Clan, some of the more decadent Bs - Baudelaire, Burroughs, and Buñuel.

Patti Smith beside Hedy Lamar.

Tom Waits under Sir Isaac Newton. 

John Coltraine sharing a frame with John Keats. 

Billie Holiday and Franz Kafka with similar expressions, leaning towards each other in their respective frames.

Then there were those she wasn’t cool enough to recognize - a black man holding a walking stick capped with a full-sized skull, an older white man posed with a film camera, a silver-haired man and a dark-haired white woman wearing a dress with a lacy neckline and her hair in victory rolls, lots of men in black and white photos smoking, several women looking knowingly into the camera, several Baroque era gentlemen in paintings, and several Native Americans sitting for portraits. 

Centered within them, as if they were its frame, was an actual painting, also a portrait, though in this case alone the subject was not looking outwards, but had her head slightly turned to stare out of an open window. 

She was pale, from her thick, white-blonde hair that was barely held in place by a ribbon at the base of her neck, to her colorless skin, to her pearl pink twenties style afternoon dress. 

The artist had captured the sense that the coarse mane of hair was about to burst from its delicate binding, as well as the seemingly perfect stillness of the woman with her legs tucked up on the large, brown velvet chair, both contrasting with the trees outside rustling their leaves and the curtain that had billowed out behind her as a wave of wine-colored damask.

There was an androgynous beauty to the woman, who was elegantly long-legged and angular, but with a tenderness to the way her hands draped over the side of the chair and her knees, and to the arch of her neck.

The painting glowed and dazzled in the darkened basement.

“I -, I know this picture from somewhere…” Kay said, trying to remember where from.

“I very much doubt it, my dear girl. This beautiful thing has probably not seen the light of day since it was finished,” Marlowe reached out and touched the paint so very softly with the pads of his fingers. His eyes closed, “Yes, I am not as gifted as the subject was, but even I can tell that she’s been locked in the darkness for decades. Badly done, Adam, badly done,” he scolded their missing host.

Kay fished her phone out of her pocket, suddenly remembering where she knew the painting from. “Look,” she said, after searching online for a few moments, thrusting the device into Marlowe’s face. He gave her a frown, stepping back so the screen didn’t bop him in his prominent nose. “Moonlit Eve by Lady Alice Sha-”

“Yes, I know,” he cut her off. “The painter and the subject were very good friends for a time. But, then, time ends as many things as it creates.”

The painting on her phone was the same as one hanging on Adam’s wall, but for two elements. In ‘Moonlit Eve’ the subject’s eyes were closed, not vast and dark and wondering like in the work before them, and she was bathed in moonlight. 

Here, she was showered in the sun, which caught glints of gold in her fair hair.

Several years before there had been a major retrospective of the work of Lady Alice Meadows-Sharpe, one of the most notorious and fearless female artists of the early 20th century. It had toured the major cities and, because of a generous donation from an anonymous donor, briefly visited the art museum in town. 

The lines had been endless, so rarely did the work of such an important artist - who was also a feminist icon of sorts - show in their town. Even her parents had gone. 

Kay had stood in that line twice. Honestly, she had not especially noticed ‘Moonlit Eve’, lovely though it was. Like most of the visitors, she had been more interested in the larger, more scandalous works that had given the artist her reputation, especially the life-sized nude she’d painted of her husband and muse, staring frankly out of the canvas as he held himself.

The challenging hunger, desire, and love of his expression as much as his beautiful face and body - and impressive penis - had left Kay a very good kind of sad, and feeling rather lonely. Lonely for someone who would look at her that way, for someone who clearly did not exist for her.

There wasn’t much comfort in realizing they didn’t exist for most people.

She had bought the show catalogue and never opened it.

“Eve wanted to make Alice into one of us, but by that point she had children and it would have been too fucking cruel to ask her to watch them … well, and she would  _ never _ have left her husband,” Adam’s voice made them both jump and turn guiltily. 

He was leaning in the doorway, one leg crossed over the other ankle, his head cocked to the side, looking like the subject of an Elizabethan painting himself, his clothing aside. 

Kay thought Adam would look splendid in velvet and silk, even though he would no doubt hate to wear them. 

_ He had worn them, _ she remembered,  _ he had worn them and she was little more than a moment in his long life. _

“I paid for this,” he pointed limply at the wall, “with a composition. Alice had all of the money in the world, so I wrote a dance piece for her anniversary, one that she could move to. She had a physical disability that made it hard for her to move easily, without pain, and all she wanted in the world was to dance with her husband…”

His voice was dreamy, then his eyes grew hard and he strode with three long, ringing steps, and formally bowed to the painting, “Eve, this is Kay Adams,” he gestured to Kay, and then locked angry eyes with hers, “Kay,” he snarled, “allow me to introduce my wife, Eve. Now,” he took a step back, “both of you, get the fuck out of my home!”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone who has read my story "Perfection" there is an Easter egg in this chapter.


	14. "I'm sorry I sound calm. I assure you I'm hysterical." - Gena Rowlands in Jim Jarmusch's "Night on Earth"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kay goes home.

The sound of Kay’s keys locking the store with what were clearly shaking hands, as Kit tried with his ancient eloquence to convince her to come with him, that he would happily explain to Adam that the fault was all his, filtered down through the old wooden floor of the bookstore.

Kay, her voice also shaking, just kept saying, “No. No, thank you. No. I am a grown person… If not quite so grown as you Mr. Marlowe, and I can take responsibility for myself. No, thank you.”

Her boots tapped on the cement - quick, anxious, if steps could sound anxious, accompanied by Marlowe’s semi-shuffle, until they were out of Adam’s hearing, covered by the sounds of late trick or treaters and university students getting ready to hit the clubs, the parties, the bars, and wherever else they could cause trouble in costumes, and leaves scuttering across the sidewalks and streets as the wind picked up.

Adam nodded to no one and turned back from the stairs, walking into his bedroom, what might have been adrenaline in a living man coursing through him. Making fists, trying to work out some of the energy, he grasped the handle of the false wall to slam it back into place, his face averted so he did not have to  _ see _ again. Against his palms it was perfectly smooth, and as invisible as the wall itself when it was in place, he’d not touched it since he’d finished building it and slid it closed when he’d first moved in. 

It was good work. Beautiful only in its utilitarianism, but solid. 

The wood was still warm from Kay holding it as she stared at him, eyes mortified and tragic behind her glass.

Swallowing nothingness, he turned his head and looked.

Not a speck of dust had made its way through the false wall to touch Eve’s face.

Almost one hundred years had passed since those nights when Eve had modeled for sweet Alice Sharpe. She had been a terrible model, actually. Fidgeting and wanting to see, asking Alice question after question. Had she ever considered mixing her own pigments? Did she stretch her own canvases? Were the unusual easels she used of her own design?

“She has a servant for such trivial things, Eve,” Sir Thomas had said laughingly, from across the room where he was showing Adam a new idea he had for a prosthetic hand that was probably still ahead of its time. The Sharpes were inseparable, even sharing studio space. “And he does rather good work, if I do say so myself.”

“And I imagine he works for kisses, Sir Thomas,” Eve had said with a bright smile. The Sharpe’s depth of shared feeling delighted her. 

Almost one hundred years.

He looked at Eve. Alice had captured her, something he would have thought was impossible, but there it was. Eve’s eternal stillness and pixie humor. Her mischief and her dark seriousness. 

Adam could almost see her turning her head towards him, a bit of her hair coming loose to tease the air, her eyes squinting with affection.

Instead, she kept looking away, and he could hear her muttering that he was being an asshole.

Looking upwards, huffing slightly, and then looking back hoping that particular sense would go away.

It didn’t.

Finally, he threw his hands up, “Fine, alright, fine. I’m going! Fine. Stop not looking at me like that.”

Whipping his leather jacket off of the back of one of the kitchen chairs so fast he knocked it over, Adam took the stairs three at a time.

Kay mumbled a hello to her neighbor Tonya and her grandsons Marcus and David, just back from trick or treating when she met them on the stairs. “I have some candy I saved for you from the store,” she said, rooting around in her purse.

The twins - tiny, four years old, adorable, and both dressed as a Black Panther, Marcus was King T’challa and David was Huey P. Newton - practically hopped up and down since they knew Kay was always good for full-sized candy bars and bags of gummy worms since David couldn’t have dairy. “You ok?” Tonya asked, her eyes concerned. “You having problems with that good looking boy that brought you that MacDonald’s?”

Tonya was in charge of the faculty dining room at the university and had known Kay’s family since she had been little older than her boys, so she felt it was her place to meddle as much as she wanted. Especially since Kay’s own parents never did. 

The twins stared from their grandmother to her at the mention of McDonald’s. Surely there could be no greater offering than that.

Dropping the candy into the proffered buckets, one of which was shaped like Iron Man’s helmet and the other a traditional jack o' lantern, Kay shrugged a little. “Why would you assume it was man trouble?”

“Because you are not the kind of woman to get in trouble on your own. You’ve always been a good girl. A man who looks like that one? He’s likely to be all kinds of trouble.” Then she smiled and elbowed Kay. “Of course, sometimes a woman wants a little of that. Say thank you and good night to Ms. Adams. You both need baths.”

In perfect sync, the twins thanked her and barrelled up the stairs.

In her apartment Kay carefully took off her boots and her jacket, putting them away in the front closet, and put her purse where she always left it next to the door, all with great care to not think too much about the fact that she had met Christopher Marlowe that night. Knowing that if she gave that matter too much thought she would be incapable of doing anything else, she did what she could to keep her head filled with white noise. Her father would run two fans in his office to keep from being overwhelmed by the sounds of his five sons and she had learned to mimic the sound in her own head when she was trying to not obsess over something.

Or to also block out the sounds of her brothers.

Now, it helped keep the weird panic about Marlowe from overwhelming her as she got a cup of tea, turned on her desk lamp, and pulled out her stationery drawer to pick out the appropriate paper for the apology she needed to write Adam.

He’d been very angry.

His fangs had been down. He probably hadn’t even known they were.

His eyes were terrible.

Christopher Marlowe from the Elizabethan era had offered to buy her a glass of wine at Paul’s Lounge to calm her nerves. “I rather like that fake tree,” he’d said.

Christopher  **_Motherfucking_ ** (as Adam would say) Marlowe! 

Kay turned her mental fans on high and picked plain, cream-colored paper with a matching envelope, since the stationery with the little foxes, or the set with the green, Swiss dotted borders both seemed too twee for a note to Adam even when she wasn’t mortified by her own behavior.

Which was how she started.

_ Dear Mr. Clarke,  _

_ I am mortified by my behavior last of night. The invasion of another person’s privacy is not only horrible, it is again- _

Which was as far as she got before her buzzer rang.

Expecting it to be late trick or treaters, she looked at the tiny screen, as she reached for her purse for the last of the candy. 

It fell from her hand, spilling Three Musketeers bars, her wallet, her phone, the envelope where she kept her coupons, a copy of  _ The Likeness _ by Tana French, and three lipsticks, one of which that she especially liked rolled under one of her bookcases and was not found again until she moved.

Adam, not wearing his sunglasses, was again staring into the camera.

Before she could consider if it was a good idea she buzzed him in and then scrambled around the floor to pick up her things.

Adam pulled the outside door open and waited for a second, considering. The ethics of entering a multi-dweller building was iffy for his kind. Though if he kept his gloves on and even whilst wearing them didn’t touch anything in the semi-public space of the hallways it should be alright, but he still felt like to jump out of his fucking skin just sensing the lives of Kay’s neighbors tucked away behind the doors in the 70s abomination of a building she lived in.

Not sure what he was going to say yet, the few words that had occurred to him were knocked out of his head when Kay opened the door before he could knock. Her glasses slightly askew and she was slightly flushed as if she had just been exerting herself somehow, even her normally neat, stick-straight hair was a bit messy.

She looked as if she had been caught mid-fuck.

The growl that wanted to rip out of him was just barely stoppable, but nothing else was.

Trying to smooth her hair down, she did that thing where she squared her shoulders as if preparing for battle. It drove him fucking crazy when she did that, always had. 

“I was writing you an apology. I am really, so very ashamed of myself, I have never before done something to invade someone’s privacy in such a way. Not even my brother’s, only _ one _ of whom offered  _ me _ the same courtesy if you don’t mind me adding a personal note, so I somewhat understand how horrible it is when you feel invaded and -” the words rushed out of her. Adam could all but feel the chagrin crawling over her skin, “I don’t expect you to forgive me for such a gross violation. I can only hope that you won’t ask Earl to fire me, but I would understand if you did.”

“Fire you? Why the fuck would I ask Earl to fire you? And why would he if I did ask?” 

She smelled amazing. With that flush, her cheeks would taste like copper.

Lips twisting in an adorable frown, she tried out rolling her eyes, and that was adorable too. Adam hated that he found her so fucking adorable. “Clearly you are Earl’s partner in the store. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I am not entirely ignorant of the financials, you know.” 

Of course, she did. When it came to practical things, things with corners, things that had definition in the physical world Kay was brilliant. She was equally brilliant with the written word, and with understanding about art, her regrettable taste in some music aside. She was just shit when it came to emotions, psychology, what an idiot might call the mysteries of the human heart.

Mysteries which, he told himself, his mind rushing even faster than her words had, were actually things like the most heart attacks happen on Monday mornings, and that it pumped 2,000 gallons of blood a day, and that there really was such a thing as a broken heart and it could kill you.

Kay had stopped talking, waiting for him to say or do something.

“Oh, fuck this,” he grumbled. Then he did what he did without asking permission, which Adam knew she would consider rude but he didn’t give a fuck. She owed him one after that horseshit with his wall, and he was taking it.

Adam pulled her body tight to his, leaning back so his hips jutted a bit, lifting her so her toes just brushed the little hook rug in front of her door, and kissed her.

His mouth was hungry, not for her blood, but for her lips, her tongue, he licked deep into her, stroking and tasting and messy. Leaving her gasping for breath, her body burning hot so she sweated through her witch’s dress which was made of rather cheap, unbreathing material because she only wore it once a year. 

He pulled back, staring into her eyes. No heavy breathing, because he didn’t breathe, let alone sweat, but his eyes were all but pure black. 

“I was married to one woman in my life. She called herself Eve, and named me Adam, and she saved me from myself more times than I can remember. We were married for hundreds of years and I loved her every day of them, together or apart, even when she drove me mad. I didn’t die on the battlefield where I was left for dead, or even when my maker drank my blood and gave me his own in return.  _ I  _ died when  _ she  _ died, and I have been the walking dead since then. The only reason I had for not laying down in the sun was because _ Eve _ wouldn’t want that for me. Because maybe I could manage to get my head out of my own ass eventually and revenge my loss on those fuckers that took her away from me. But now I don’t know. I don’t know, Kay.”

His hands held her upper arms, loosely, and when he finished he sucked in as if he had forgotten he didn’t need air, and look away from her.

“You don’t know what?” 

Would she never learn to not ask obvious questions? Kay cursed herself.

She waited for him to roll his eyes, or say “really?” in that deep, resonant voice, or huff, or even tell her to shut up.

Instead, he shook his head, “You don’t have to apologize. I know Kit. He has the sense of privacy of a cat and has been talking people into doing things they know better than to do for centuries.”

He still wouldn’t look at her. 

“Why did you kiss me?”

“Kay…” he stroked his gloved hands through his hair, leaving it like a kind of Goth halo. He started to back away. That he was clearly fighting with himself over something left her feeling helpless and even worse. “Kay… can I come in?”

“I- what?” She stepped back, kicking her purse with her heel and almost tripping. She ducked up and down as quickly as she could to pick it up and put it on the little table.

He shook his head, now looking at her, “You have to invite me. Otherwise, it’s… bad things can happen. Mostly to me, thank fuck, but to you too. And once you invite me, you are going to have a time uninviting me, so you need to know that.”

“Why would I uninvite you? Yes, please come in,” she gestured into her apartment, more worried about the look she might see on Adam’s face than anything else.

“I can never decide if you are the most naive genius in the world, or if you are just from another planet entirely,” he said, holding up his hands. “May I?”

“May you what?” 

Adam had been through about seventeen emotions - most of which Kay did not recognise or at least understand - since showing up at her door, and it was getting a bit dizzying.

“Can I take my gloves off? You know because I can read thi-”

“Psychometry!” she snapped, “Yes, right, I have no secrets so go ahead.”

Now he gave her the strangest smile of all. Eyebrow raised, he slowly peeled them off, making quite a show of it. His long fingers of one hand worked to slowly loosen the leather from the fingers of the other, and then took the cuff, turning them up as he tugged slowly, revealing the pale inside of his boney wrist, the tendons sharp and strong, then the palm, large and calloused from when he was still alive and had used it to hold a blade as well as play the lute, the harpsichord, the violin, that had also left his fingertips, now at last bared, hard and strong.

Then he repeated the performance.

With a lazy gesture, he dropped the gloves onto her purse. 

They were so large they hid it entirely.

Those very big hands were entirely naked in her apartment and Kay was flustered by the sight of them. Even though she had seen Adam’s whole self entirely naked in his lair it was not as agitating as those hands were now.

“Are you trying to be sexy?” she asked, taking some refuge behind the wingback chair where she liked to read in the evenings. The confusion of her feelings and his was leaving her off-kilter.

Adam laughed, that loud, startled bark he always gave, as if he was forever caught off guard by his own ability to be amused. “Based on that response I’m guessing it’s not working. I’ve always been shit at seducing. Other people always did the seducing with me.”

“No! No. You are very good at it! I just- I wasn’t thinking that the next time you saw me you’d be- that is to say I didn’t think you would ever again want to seduce me,” she whispered ‘seduce’ as if it were a secret. “Ever.”

“Kay?” Adam positively sauntered over to the chair, putting a knee on the seat so he could lean over the back of it, so he could be close to her while still letting her have the illusion of the barrier.

There was sauntering and seduction going on in her apartment and Kay was flummoxed by it.

“Yes?”

“I think you should shut up now. Unless there is something you want me to do, or stop doing, to your body. Ok?’

She nodded, her lips firmly together, her knees wanting to buckle or make her jump up and down, she couldn’t say which.

Now bare hands slid over her neck, up into her hair. Hard, steady fingertips teased gently at her lips, stroking the delicate skin inside, causing a shudder to start deep between her legs and stir her blood, tightening her nipples. Her eyelashes fluttered closed and her mouth opened. 

Sucking on his fingers, Kay had to reach out and grab the stiff leather of his jacket to keep herself from pitching over backward. It felt so good to even have that part of him in her, she sucked harder and her jaw almost hurt and she may have been drooling a little. There was certainty in what her body wanted that she didn’t have in any other way with him.

Adam swore and stood, shoving her chair to the side so he could loom over her. “Your couch is too fucking small, where’s the bed?”

Not opening her eyes, sucking harder and loving doing it, Kay made what she hoped was in the direction of her bedroom. There was a terrible whine that she found herself making when he pulled his fingers out. “Fuck!” he gritted out. 

Then he kissed her again, wrangling both of them around and about, stripping off his jacket, unzipping the back of her now sweat-soaked dress, unbuckling his belt, pushing her dress down so he had to lift her out of the tripping puddle it became, stopping to swear again at the sight of her black bra with the pink bow and the fishnets that left her all but naked from the waist down and kissed her again, slower this time, but deeper, fisting her hair and then stopping again to bend down and pull his boots off, and then pushing her so they were in her bedroom.

“Take off that bra,” he snarled at her.

For the first time in her life, Kay pulled a bra off over her head, no doubt pulling it out of shape. Her breast literally bounced and Adam fell to his knees, momentarily burying his face between them, then gently nicking one of the blue veins that she was always a little embarrassed at the sight of. 

Adam’s mouth changed her mind about that entirely. One hand supported her back while the fingers of the other worked their way under her tights, pushing them down so they bound her knees and he could tease between her legs while he sucked and sucked.

One relentless, slightly rough fingertip found her clit and toyed with it, first with too gentle rubbing up and down, and then with firm, nearly mean, circles. Kay grabbed Adam’s shoulders and buried her face in his rough, musky mane, where she could moan and blush and sob to her heart's content.

“Come for me, pretty Kay,” he whispered to her skin, as teasing as his fingers. “Let this sweet gilly-flower bloom for me, darling, spread your legs.”

Gripping harder so she could, even as she worried at his hair with her own teeth, insensible to anything but how good every inch of her starving skin felt, how good and soft and wet and ready her pussy was. With an ungraceful shimmy and using her toes to hook the hose she managed to get her fisnets down to where they were wrapped around one ankle and she could give him the access he wanted.

That teasing finger thrust into her and then, pressing hard on the wall of her center, dragged slowly down until it found her g-spot. 

The finest, softest, slowest scratch of one of Adam’s nails, combined with his tongue flickering away from her blood to lap her nipple, spilled Kay into a spiraling orgasm that went on and on when he pressed his palm against her clit and let her work herself for as long as her legs would hold her up.

When she came back to herself she was on the floor, her hair everywhere, Adam leaning over her with his hands on either side of her head. He licked his bloody mouth. “Thank fucking Jesus it’s only ten o’clock.”

“Why?” she managed to say, wrapping her legs around one of his so she could shamelessly rub herself on him. The denim was soft with use but not too soft. He undulated his hips to help her, and little aftershocks of pleasure quaked her in the best way.

“Because I can’t go on like this, so I plan on fucking you out of my system and I think it might take a while.”

“Oh.” Kay felt like she should have been deflated by his words. 

She wasn’t.

Instead, she tilted her head and smiled, “I think you should give it your best shot, Mr. Clarke.”


	15. The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events. - Jim Jarmusch (Pt. 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam starts to keep good on his promise, and Kay does some thinking

Kay had never been the sort to gaze adoringly let alone smile fondly at a lover. 

Mostly this was due to her never having had a lover  _ as such _ . 

She’d had any number of boyfriends, most of whom she’d had infrequent sex because she seemed to give off intense, asexual pheremones. She had liked nearly all of the men she had dated, of course, or she would not have gone out with them. All of them, with the exception of Bill, she was still quite friendly with if not entirely friends. 

They were funny, intelligent, and kind. 

All of them. 

Other than Bill.

There were even one or two who were romantic at certain times and in specific cases, like birthdays or Christmas. But there had always come that moment when she was embarrassed by having to ask  _ so many times _ for sex, and they all were confused that one sex act every month or so was not enough to tide her over for another 30-ish days.

Between breakups Kay would sometimes have a one night - or more honestly, a one fifteen minute - stand now and again. With breasts as big as hers meaningless sex with strangers was always a ready indecent possibility. But what her mother liked to call her prim, pragmatic, and persnickety heart had never been in it, and had even forcibly rebelled. 

Her parent’s perfect, if elliptic, partnership had impressed itself upon her at an early age. Kay longed for one for herself deeply enough that she found over time she would rather be alone than not have it.

Vibrators, even nice ones, were relatively inexpensive and easy to obtain, in a wide variety of colors, and while she did not have a large number of friends, those she had were close and loyal. Her job gave her genuine joy. She was on her way to having saved enough money to buy herself a little house of her own. 

It was not perfect, but it was hers, all arranged in a way that suited her and left her with little time for loneliness.

Not to mention she had recently discovered that the undead walked amongst the living, met and gotten into trouble with the famous, dead, not-the-author-of-Shakespeare’s-canon-but-still-a-major-poet Christopher Marlowe, and bought a pair of Doc Marten’s which she found she liked despite their not being  _ her _ . 

So it wasn’t boring either.

And yet here she stood in the doorway of her bedroom, holding a bag of frozen Frenched green beans wrapped in a tea towel against her labia, gazing and smiling fondly at Adam who was sprawled on her bed, looking askance at her. Even if he was never going to be her perfect, elliptic partner, he _ had _ been someone’s. Prickly, difficult, reclusive, gloomy, snobbish, messy, and dour, and still madly in love with his dead wife.

It gave Kay hope that there might be someone for her yet.

Hope. 

As well as a tiny bit of pain deep in her heart where she could keep it her own secret that it wouldn’t be him.

“I have to ask, is this bed from your childhood dollhouse?” Adam asked, an eyebrow raised. Against her white pillow his hair looked as if it had been scribbled on with the side of a pencil lead by someone pressing hard enough to break the tip. Yet despite it’s coarse appearance it was strangely soft. “No  _ actual  _ bed is this small.”

Adam really didn’t fit in her bed. His long, bony feet hung over the carved wooden footboard, and his broad shoulders left her almost no room for her own shoulders, should she climb back in with him, which was her plan. He had even stolen all of her pillows while she was in the kitchen, since that hair alone needed plenty of space. 

“It’s a Full-sized bed, which is the largest size that will fit in this room without ruining the proportions.” Adam looked around the room with a half scowl, as if trying to find something that might qualify as proportions in her admittedly petite, 70s era prefab apartment, while she kept talking. “You’re the only thing that’s not normal here. Also, you seemed perfectly fine with it quite recently.” 

Adam had been more than fine with it, in fact. He’d seemed to rather like how small her bed was when he finished hastily stripping both of them and rolled her over, so he could make his way from her feet upwards. Touching, kissing wetly, commenting on her skin, her ass, her hair, which gathered in one twisted coil and yanked firmly so she was still while he perused.

When she was shivering at even the barest touch, he had slid her legs wide, and then lay on her, in her, surrounding and crowding and overwhelming her. He kept one hand on her hip so she couldn’t move other than to barely grind her aching clit against her mattress.

Oh, he moved so gently then...

Slowly. Not leisurely, because there was nothing relaxed about it, but slowly, with motions that made her feel fragile, and even precious. It made her want to curl up and hide, which was impossible with him covering her, fucking her. A few tears had worked their way down her face and Kay knew Adam knew. He could probably smell the salt coming from them, but he said nothing and she pretended he couldn’t tell.

She had felt the tension in every line of him. One of his long, sinewy hands was pushed deep into the pillow beside her head and she could see the tightness in every line. When she kissed the prominent, red knuckles, he had fisted hard enough to make the cotton and feathers squeak, and he had stopped, his forehead pressed to the back of her hair. 

Kay put her hand over his.

Every line of him tight and hard and perfectly, unbreathingly still, needing to gather himself.

Kay knew that if he had been alive, he would have been panting, his sweat dripping down and soaking her. Then he kissed the back of her neck, a bare brush of his lips, and started to move again, 

When he had said he was going to fuck her out of his system Kay had imagined something wild and exhilarating. Her legs thrown over his shoulders as he pounded her in rhythm to an ancient war chant. Or maybe him dropping her onto his penis and forcing her to ride faster and faster as he kept time with hard swats to her behind.

Rather, it was tender and devastating. 

Pleasure unfurled languidly from between her legs, burying itself in her bones, slicking her skin, sweetening her blood, and the slowness of his fucking was like how water moved on the stillest day. 

When Adam bit her shoulder, not with his fangs but still hard, the sharp shock of pain shot adrenaline and endorphins through her, straight back down between her legs. She squeezed his hand, and gasped into her pillow as the orgasm shook her. Every inch.

While she was still trembling Adam worked his free hand under her waist and lifted just a little so he could hit her in a different spot, extending her orgasm, changing it, making her spurt for the first time ever. “I’m going to lick you clean. Your belly, your thighs, your cunny,” he had gritted out, finishing himself with a low noise that could have been pain, collapsing softly enough to not crush her but rather to leave her feeling… safe.

Afterwards, recovering much more quickly because he was a vampiric rock star and so had more experience with debauchery than she did, Adam was as good as his word. 

Digging her fingers into that wild nest of hair, which seemed to snarl and coil, to trap her, he ate her out with a messy enthusiasm, moaning nasty Latin that her Classics studies classes had not prepared her for. 

As she lay, panting and looking down at him, he lifted his head once, gave her a very out of character wink, bit firmly into her mons. She could have sworn she heard his fangs click on bone, which rather than disturbing her it seemed impossibly intimate. 

Then he licked that clean as well.

When he finished he strolled naked out of the room. “Where are you going?” she had wanted to call out but her voice was little more than a croak, that his preternatural ears picked up at any rate. 

“Kitchen. You need some water.”

He had been right.

“Bring me a cookie from the rooster shaped jar, please.”

Adam had been naked in her kitchen. Getting her a glass of ice water and a cookie. 

She had gingham curtains in that kitchen, and a spring hare motif. 

It made her a little sad to think that she hadn’t had the energy to run after him to see the expression on his face when he looked around a room that even she considered marginally too twee. 

When she had the strength she had pulled on her softest robe which was still nearly too rough on her still overstimulated skin and tottered on unsteady legs to the bathroom, which had led to the visit to the kitchen for the green beans that she hated to waste but it couldn’t be helped. Truthfully, as she was at best an adequate cook they were probably serving a better purpose between her legs than they would on the plate.

Then she noticed the little bit of the white on white striped sheets and pillowcases that could be seen under Adam’s various limbs and hair mass, frowning. 

He frowned back at her, “What’s wrong?”

“I just wish I’d known you were coming over. I have nicer bedding than that. Obviously,” she added.

Kay expected him to roll his eyes. Instead, they went heavy lidded as he dragged the calloused tips of the fingers of one hand over his lower lip, while the other cupped around his half-hardened penis. 

“Yeah, I find these sheets appalling, too. Thankfully by the time we’re done fucking you’ll have to burn them, or maybe bury them with a stake through them.”

Kay would never burn those sheets. She might be buried with them, though not in them, she already had a dress picked out for that.

“Come here,” he lifted his chin a bit, his eyes black and depthless.

The pose, the knowingness of his expression, the gorgeousness of him, was so very like the painting of Sir Thomas - who she still hadn’t processed that Adam had  _ known _ \- that she had been so infatuated with for a such long time made that hurt in her heart that had been a pleasant hum bloom and blossom. 

So like that painting, but without the love in his eyes that there had been in Thomas’s. 

“I’m… um… I’m still a little sore. These beans are useless.” Suddenly frustrated, she threw them across the room into the enameled metal wastebasket by the closet, knocking it over. “I’m going to take some ibuprofen and a shower. You’ll have to finish fucking me out of your system after.”

Rather than slam the bathroom door she closed it with a dignified click and did not cry even when the water poured over her head.

  
  
  
  
  
  



	16. The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events. - Jim Jarmusch (pt 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam looks at some books and thinks about plants.

Whether it was a result of his social anhedonia, or a lack of positive illusions, both of which long predated his becoming what he was, Adam had never been much good at lying to himself. Or bothering to lie to others. 

Even the unconscious lies that people used to make it possible to get out of bed and move through their lives - be it a general optimism bias, or more specific untruths, like that their job mattered, as if they were in some way benefitting the world rather than just making money for rich assholes who already had too much, all whilst distracting themselves from their own lack of an inner life - had always escaped him.

But as bad and normally unwilling as he was at telling himself any kind of lies, fuck if he wasn’t laying there in Kay’s cute, tiny bed, on a patchwork quilt that he could feel she had made herself, giving it a  _ goddamned _ try. 

She was fine. She said she was just a little sore and Kay wasn’t a liar either, so he completely fucking believed that. After all, he had just made love to her like his soul depended on it and that was bound to leave someone-

“Shit!”

He hadn’t made love to her or any other mealy-mouthed euphemism. He had fucked her, pure and simple. 

Sitting up, running both of his hands through his hair several times, he looked around the little room. The walls were pale primrose, the furniture plain, and painted a warm, creamy white, matching the long curtains. There were framed prints of classic book jackets, a soft, long tufted throw rug, and a blue glass pitcher on the dresser filled with _ helianthus angustifolius  _ \- swamp sunflowers.

Imagining Kay going to the flower shop on the street over from the bookstore after work one day and buying herself those flowers, and the bouquet of  _ hydrangea quercifolia  _ he had seen on her small kitchen table, made him want to punch a brick wall. Made him want to….

No. 

That was exactly the kind of shit that if he thought about it was going to make it all but impossible to keep lying to himself that everything was fine. 

To distract himself, Adam decided to engage in an act of tiny, petty revenge by invading her privacy just a little. He opened the drawer of her bedside table.

Seeing what was in there, he was both pleased he had long since lost the blood count needed to blush, and also noted he had seen one of those items in action in Lesbian Rock Stars Volumes four and eleven, and in the first Diva Dykes short. 

That was enough privacy invasion for one visit, he told himself, firmly shutting the drawer, especially since it just made him feel worse.

Kay was fine. Fuck, she was probably more fine than he was. Just in her shower, under the hot water, using that shampoo that smelled like camomile. The one he found inoffensive. He could smell her squeezing it out of the bottle, the scent intensifying as she worked it through her wet hair.

After spending longer than he would ever let her know trying to  _ not _ think about Kay naked, Adam  _ now  _ really tried to think those prurient thoughts. To imagine thick, white lather sliding down her shoulders and onto those big, gorgeous tits of hers, bubbles catching on hard nipples, and her slowly wiping them away. What she would look like bending over to wash her legs, that thick, chewable ass waiting to be -

“Shit…” he mouthed, falling backward. He couldn’t do it. Now when he needed the distraction, the images that Adam had been banishing from his thoughts for years wouldn’t form. “Fuck you out of my system.  _ What  _ kind of asshole says that?”

A stupid motherfucking rock star, that kind of asshole. 

Impatient with himself, he pulled his jeans on and went into the living room to look at her books.

The longest wall in the room was given up to a lot of what looked like decently put together, very full, homemade bookcases with just barely enough clearance at the ceiling for three trailing English ivies -  _ hedera helix _ \- spaced out along their tops. 

Adam vaguely remembered Kay saying one of her brothers did carpentry as a hobby. Though he wasn’t as good as Eve, when he lay his hand on the wood and closed his eyes he could sense the deep, oddly shaped well of that brother’s mind being stilled and comforted by the texture of the grain as he smoothed it to a satin-y gleam. He had worn airbuds and listened to Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites while making them.

The music was as much impregnated in the wood as the stain that deepened its color.

Henry. That was the name. The neurodivergent brother who was so much like their father. 

The sound of Yo-Yo Ma’s rich, omnivorous genius was as embedded in the wood as Henry’s rather shy love for his big sister who always remembered all of the rules. 

Adam’s fingertips traced along the wood, not quite able to make himself stop touching it.

There was nothing on the shelves but books. No photos, those were hanging from the walls or sitting on the end table, no knicknacks, which were plentiful elsewhere, and no dust. His mouth turned up just a little bit. Though she was clearly a bit of a neat freak Kay never complained or showed any irritation at the cluttered state of the bookstore or the triumph of chaos that was his place. 

Though he was good at understanding systems it took Adam a few minutes to work out the order Kay had her books arranged in, since they were obviously placed with great care. 

Apuleius was shelved beside a history of bread baking. Dickens was in three different places, though all of Françoise Sagan’s skinny spines were lined up together, as were the more weighty works of Jane Austen. There was an entire shelf in one case dedicated to science fiction, though there was little of it elsewhere, quickly followed by several pieces of self-help garbage that he was surprised to see anywhere in Kay’s domain. Salted through were well-thumbed Rough Guides to places like Montreal, Seattle, Edinburgh, Charleston, Paris, and San Francisco. 

Stepping back as far as he could, so the backs of his calves struck the seat of her low sofa, he took a full look. On the top left-hand corner there were a lot of kids books - picture books, novels, D’aulaire’s Norse Myths, Where the Wild Things Are, even The Giving Tree which he knew that Kay, like most booksellers, held in contempt. 

On the lower right hand, there were several better but still incorrect books on vampire lore, Silence by John Cage which he had given to her, and a book about the English Civil war.

Now his smile was so broad it started to hurt.

It was her autobiography, and his fingers itched to grab that first book, that copy of  _ Goodnight Moon _ , and work his way to _ The Night is Short, Walk On Girl _ , the latest book she had added to her great work. After what, perhaps a day and a half or two days of reading he would know what she was made of?

Adam made himself take in the rest of the room. There were a few pieces of original art on the walls, as well as a large, framed poster of the jacket of her father’s book on Shakespeare. The walls were painted a soft, deep grey, and the floor was scrupulously swept.

Everything in the living room was neat, clean, in order, and well-cared for. The dark green drapes matched part of the pattern on the oval rug. The camel-backed couch was old, the comfortable looking chair by the window had a small table next to it with a stack of books, each with a blue ribbon for a bookmark somewhere in it. They were mostly ARCs for books coming out for the holidays or in the spring, except for the one in the middle.

Shit.

The cover was just as lurid and shitty and disgusting as Adam remembered. A picture of him, playing at the Casbah in fucking L.A. in ... who gave a fuck when in the 90s, cut out and intentionally badly photoshopped over the - relatively - famous police photo of the wall of his former studio in Red Bank. 

Awash in Eve’s fucking blood.

Of course, that on its own wasn’t messed up enough for the good folks at Feral House Publishing. They had boosted the red to the point where it was almost painful to look at and then used FF Brokenscript font in the same impossible crimson for the title - Beneath the Skin, Above the Bone: Love, Murder, and the Impossible Genuis of A.J. Clarke. And then smaller, in the same scare font, the name of the author Ian Watson.

The story of the disappearance of musician - underground cult figure, a rockstar’s rockstar - and possible murder victim  _ or _ possible murderer A.J. Clarke was referenced in a fair number of works about the 90s music scene, on a large number of true crime websites over the years, and had even been the subject of half of an episode of Forensic Files. That Watson, who was both an obsessive fan and a semi-professional writer, had managed to dig up enough grime and factual information to get a book out of it would have been admirable if it had been about someone  _ else _ .

Adam knew it was hypocritical to feel that way, but he didn’t give a goddamn. There wasn’t even any comfort in the fact that the book wasn’t half bad. Feral House may have been intentionally seedy and sensational, but that didn’t mean they had no standards. They wanted to shock, not to lie, and when the book had come out ten years before and Earl had slid a copy under the door of the basement and run like a coward it had pissed him off almost as much that there was so much truth in it.

Watson had even speculated that the “androgynous, Bowie-like knockout” that was seen from time to time on his arm when he was touring was not merely his sometimes lover but his secret wife.

Adam had some ideas where he got his information. 

He flipped through the pages, looking at the glossies in the center. There was his face, over and fucking over. Him working in the studio. Him tuning a Hagstrom that he’d had to leave behind when fleeing New Jersey. Him autographing some poor idiot’s copy of the utter crap EP he released in ‘92. Him sitting wearing sunglasses and grim expression as some bar in Sheffield where The Auteurs were playing with Eve leaning on him, his arm about her waist. He remembered that night. 

The band was great, the venue stank of too many zombies, dirty carpet that was more spilled lager and cigarette ash than fibers, and bad weed, and Eve had coaxed and cajoled and bribed him into dancing. Thank Christ there were no pictures of that.

He’d had a good time. 

Falling into the chair, he held the book open against his chest and stared out the window at the large, brilliantly red maple -  _ acer rubrum _ \- with the moon framed in its branches. It was probably even more beautiful in daylight, but even in the night it burned. In the distance, he could hear a Halloween party, thumping bass and filled with squeals and laughter. 

Closing his eyes, he listened farther and farther out, letting the night bring sounds of the lake water, of cars rumbling slowly through quiet streets, to soft wind scuttering leaves across the tarmac, to kissing, to squirrels giving each other whatfor in the branches, to Kay’s bare feet crossing the floor.

“I guess you're angry about my reading that book, too.”

Kay was in the doorway, wearing a robe and drying her hair, her expression and voice both slightly aggravated. Not like her at all. Kay didn’t get aggravated. 

_ That’s just me, isn’t it? _ Adam thought to himself grimly.  _ Bringing out the best in everyone. _

When he didn’t answer right away she bustled over to him, smelling of lavender and mint, took the book from his hands and replaced it where it had been in the stack. 

The slight brush of her fingers on his made him start to go hard and he wanted to pull his trousers down so he could roll his eyes at his penis.

He  _ was _ forever getting angry with her about some bullshit, wasn’t he? And it was always bullshit that only bothered him for reasons that he either couldn’t understand or didn’t want to think about. Even Marlowe persuading her to open his memories and take a good hard look hadn’t made him angry because they had invaded his privacy - well, fuck that, yes it was that, just not only that.

It was that he was finding it increasingly hard to keep any distance from her except by finding some reason to be mad and shoving.

“No. I know you. I had just … forgotten this book was out there.”

Her glasses were slightly fogged, but he could see the tiredness behind them. It was late, she should be asleep rather than dealing with Adam’s Greatest Hits - rudeness, sulking, self-involvement and number one with a bullet, ignoring the thoughts and feelings of others.

“Some of the shit I have said to you…? I am a fucking asshole,” he muttered.

“Well, yes,” she said with a thoughtful nod, and he half smiled at nothing. Then, because it was who she was, she hastily added, “It’s often the case with older men. Although their irritability can usually be attributed to lower testosterone, and their frustration at the physical limits brought on by aging, which you  _ clearly _ -”

The smile grew. He couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t help himself with her. Which made him happy. And for Adam, happiness was an irritant. It rubbed him the wrong way. 

He pulled her down onto his lap, burying his nose in her damp hair, nuzzling her neck, “I’m sorry, Kay. I’ve bollocked everything up from practically the first moment with you.”

She was very stiff, and finally whispered, “I know you…” 

He wished she would stop there, but she finished, “...I know you feel guilty because you love your wife, and being with me makes you unfaithful.”

She wasn’t wrong, she just wasn’t exactly right. The fucking -  _ no _ , the making love to her, wasn’t what he felt guilty about. It was the emotions that led up to it, that spilled into it. The feelings and the fact that when he was with Kay he didn’t think about being with Eve. About wanting to do what it would take to be with her. 

He thought about surviving, and music, and dancing, and nature, and how he wanted to tell Earl that the store needed a new awning, and that he wanted to make sure that Kat’s car was running properly before winter, and he had to find out more about this new lover of Marlowe’s, and he thought about Kay.

Rather than saying any of that, he pulled her closer and turned her to face him, “None of that is your doing. I’m sorry. I’m a sorry bastard.”

She rolled her eyes, which looked silly when she did it, “I don’t think it is. But it still makes me feel bad. We can’t,” she looked down at her lap and said softly, “I can’t do this anymore if that keeps happening. I want to be your friend, Adam. I love-” she stopped again, and then, “... I love being your friend. We can be only friends.”

“No, we can’t.”

Adam kissed Kay. 

He let his eyes flutter closed and just gave himself to the kiss. It wasn’t breathtaking or passionate, but gentle and steady. 

“I promise, if I ever take my personal bullshit out on you in any way again that I will move out of the store and never come back.”

Kay opened her mouth as if to object and tell him that of course, she wouldn’t expect him to leave his home for her.

“But you’ll stay Earl’s partner, right?”

The laugh that barked out of him surprised them both. He nodded, and cuddled her to him. She pulled up her legs, then leaned on his shoulder. Adam felt something like a non-audial sigh go through him at the pressure of her head on his glenohumeral joint.

They sat like that, looking out of the window together, not speaking, until he could feel the weight of the sun starting to rise behind them. 

“Don’t worry, I have blackout curtains. I bought them just in case, after we met,” Kay said, getting up and stretching before padding away from him.

Adam flashed a fang, smiling.

Of course she did.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kay's organization courtesy of High Fidelity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQvOnDlql5g


	17. If You Hide You Will Be Sought

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam's past catches up with his present.

In the time between hanging the blackout curtains in her bedroom just before dawn and Kay getting a few hours of sleep before getting up to get ready for work, the temperature had dropped and the sweet, late Indian summer was gone. A little rain had fallen and that was all it had taken to knock most of autumn off of the trees and into the gutters.

Because the state that Adam was in during the day she hadn’t had to be quiet as she pulled out a green wool dress and matching shoes, and dug her early winter coat out of the closet. The faint light from the old fixture in her closet illuminated the range of his body under her crisp, percale sheets and handmade quilt, twisted in a position that no human’s back would survive sleeping in. A bit of his mad scientist, storm cloud hair peeked from under the pillow he had pulled over his head.

She petted it on the way out, knowing he’d give her a scowl if she tried to do it when he was awake.

When Kay arrived at the store Bianca was already waiting, pulling her too thin but very fashionable jacket close to her, clutching her phone and coffee and looking warily about. She had not put on any makeup and her normally geometrically precise afro was covered in a grey, satin scarf. 

Words spilled out of her mouth, which for Bianca wasn’t unusual, but the high, nearly hysterical tone was. 

“Thank god! You’re late. You’re never late. How can you be late today and scare the shit out of me? I was just about to call you!”

“You mean text,” Kay corrected as she unlocked the store, knowing Bianca had never used her phone as a phone ever. She even texted her grandmother. 

“I mean call!” 

“Why?” Kay frowned over her shoulder as she turned off the alarm, dropped her purse, and headed to the office for the cash drawers, trying to remember they needed more singles as well as quarters from the change run. “Can you start the coffee? I got very little sleep last night.”

Bianca, for whom making the coffee was the only part of working at the store she liked other than getting to use the store’s free wifi, actually stamped her foot like a child and didn’t move towards the breakroom. “Why? Because that woman that was murdered looks just like you!”

“What?”

“You didn’t read the paper this morning, did you? You read the paper every morning.” Bianca clattered across the floor, her phone out as she wildly looked for something.

“I told you I didn’t get mu- Oh, fuck!”

Kay grabbed Bianca’s phone. 

Murders were infrequent in town. They happened, because they happened everywhere, though no more than ten or so a year. A husband killing a wife, a gas station robbery going wrong, a bar fight ending with the loser returning with a gun. Mostly they happened in the darkest, ugliest days towards the end of winter. Or at the height of summer when the people who owned the massive ‘cottages’ on the lake came in and spent too much time drinking and bothering the locals.

Fall was not the time of year for murder. 

But the out of season aspect was not what stunned Kay. 

The woman in question - a student who was practically still a girl - had been found in Greenfield Park, her body laid on one of the benches with her hands crossed over her chest. Her throat had been destroyed. All that was left was her spine holding her head to her body. 

Apparently the police were too shocked by the nature of the crime to do a good job blocking the park and at least a dozen partying students cutting to campus after closing the bars had taken pictures. Figures dressed in Halloween costumes milled the park and could be seen in the half-light of dawn in the background of revolting, crooked pictures taken on hastily raised phones before they were shooed away. 

Someone who knew her had already posted a memorial page on Facebook. Emma Nowak, 22, from Chilimauk, majoring in Biomedical Engineering. Her parents were farmers, her sister was an actress, and she had just moved off campus with her girlfriend.

She looked so much like Kay it was startling. Granted there was a few years age difference between them, and Emma wasn’t quite as twee in style, but with her large glasses, long, stick-straight blonde hair, and the round collared blouse she wore in the picture they used as the header for the page, they could have been sister.

They almost could have been twins.

“Now I know why my mom called this morning…” Kay said, handing the phone back to Bianca. 

When Adam felt the sun retreat he woke up and stretched, knowing where he was immediately, which was not usually the case when he didn’t spend the day in his own bed. He was even rested, despite the petite size of Kay’s bed. 

For longer than he strictly needed, Adam got ready to leave. He showered, looked in kitchen cabinets since they were not an especially intimate place, memorized the contents of those bookshelves, fixed a loose window in the living room and finally got dressed and left.

At the building door a very attractive black woman and two small boys who smelled like they had to be related to her, were coming in as he went out. She raised an eyebrow at him, her lips pursed, “Uh-huh,” she said darkly, with a nod.

He knew what she meant. She didn’t fucking trust him with Kay any more than he fucking trusted himself with her. Skirting past them, Adam could feel her dark eyes digging holes in his back all of the way to the end of the block, while the boys said they were hungry and had to go to the bathroom and wanted to go inside.

The town felt odd. Though things were usually quieter the day after a holiday it wasn’t that normal exhaustion. It was quiet but in a tense way. Early as it was no one was out walking, even when he reached the more commercial blocks of shops and businesses the few people he saw were in fast-moving groups. 

As he reached the store he smelled something familiar, though faint and unclear. Before Adam could work it out, through the windows he could see Kay talking to a young man who, based on the photos he’d seen in her place, was one of her brothers. It had to be Malcolm, since he was the youngest and the only one that lived in town. She looked up, saw him, and waved a little.

The brother turned to look at him, frowning.

Adam considered what to do, then ducked his head and kept walking. Meeting family was not something he was ready for. 

Because he was forever scanning, aware of his surroundings, nervous when exposed, because he was what he was he saw more out of the corner of his gaze than most people would notice staring at it head-on which was how he saw what he thought was a picture of Kay on the front page of the local paper. 

For the first time in the decades he had lived in town he went into the corner store and bought a copy, vaguely aware of the pretty man working the counter trying to flirt with him as he read.

It took real, painful effort to run not as fast as he could, but rather to run as fast as a zombie would. The few blocks between the store and  _ Flitcraft’s _ seemed endless. Now he could smell the strangeness on the streets for the fear it was. The adrenalin and nausea of dread. 

The herd’s unconscious acknowledgment that there was a wolf stalking them.

When he was back at the store Kay was alone. Not only was her brother gone, she was the only one there. No customers, no other workers. She was standing behind the desk, arms crossed, her mouth tight and breath huffing heavily out of her nose, fury in every line of her body. 

She pointed at the paper he had not known he was still holding, crumpled so tightly in his fist it would shred if anyone tried to pull it apart, “I guess you know why Malcolm was here. My brother. Who you ran away from meeting. Is that your friend’s work? The plagiarist?” Kay’s normally precise voice had tipped into snippiness and it took him a few seconds to realise she meant Marlowe.

Adam was incredulous. “Kit? Why would you think it was Kit?” 

“Because you were with me.”

And now he was stunned.

“You think I am capable of-”

“I  _ know  _ you are capable of it.” She half-turned away, but kept her eyes on his.

They stared at each other across the space of the counter. In the background, Benjamin Britton’s Friday Afternoon played. If Adam’s heart had been able to move it would have been thundering in rage. In fear. 

Then Kay dropped her head, “I know you are capable of it, but I know you couldn’t do it, also. Wouldn’t. But you saw. You saw her face, you saw how she was killed. You saw  _ where _ she was killed. It had to be - there is no way it was a coincidence, is there?”

She put out a hand, her tone begging him to tell her that she was wrong. That this was just was a horrible thing that had nothing to do with them, even when the poor, mutilated woman had her face. But the park proved it that it couldn’t be.

The goddamned park where Jean had attacked them. 

For a few seconds, Kay was certain Adam was going to stomp out of the store, away from her. 

“It wasn’t Marlowe, alright? There is no way it was. Fuck,” he turned and kicked a stack of ancient National Geographics that Earl had been planning on doing something with for years and never let her move. They flew and scattered over the store like a flock of startled birds, the force causing pages to come loose and flutter down everywhere, while broken spines thudded down hard.

Cobweb, who had been sleeping under the counter, streaked deep into the store, probably to hide in the small opening in the wall behind the Science Fiction and Fantasy section.

The first customers that had braved the dark took one look at Adam and Kay and immediately backed out, one of the women calling out, “Is everything ok?” to Kay as she waved her phone.

“It’s fine. He just … tripped!” 

Adam and the woman gave her the same, eye-rolling look.

After she and her friends left Adam started picking up magazines, proving he was at least physically capable of cleaning up after himself. “I’m sorry. Fuck. But no, Kit didn’t slaughter that poor fucking woman. And I don’t, by the fucking way, believe that just because he’s my friend.” 

“That’s good because he called earlier with the address to the house he’s staying in, asking us to meet him there when I’m done working.”

Adam had crouched down to pick up a few pages that had landed and halted, sniffing the air, his nose wrinkled, his mouth slightly open. There was a ferality to the way he looked that she had never seen on his face and wasn’t sure she ever wanted to see again. Adam always seemed more than human, but at the moment he seemed far less. 

Tossing the pages aside he stood. Kay watched as he paced, stroking both of his hands back through his hair in a gesture she had come to recognise as his trying to self-comfort. “It’s Phillipe. It’s fucking Phillipe. I’ve seen him kill over and over. And I have seen him terrorize. That,” he pointed at where the crumpled newspaper was on the floor, “that is the exact kind of shit his twisted brain would come up with! Fuck!”

He crossed to the door, turned the closed sign and locked it. 

“The store is still open for another two hours,” she found herself objecting. 

The glare he gave her made Kay take an involuntary step back, “The store is closed until further notice. Which means until I find Phillipe. Call and tell everyone who works here that they are off with pay until further notice.”

“Adam?” 

“What?” he snarled, clearly expecting her to argue with him.

“How does he know about me?”

He had no answer.

Kay called Earl from the passenger seat of the British sportscar she didn’t know Adam owned, relieved when it went to voicemail. She left as succinct of a message as she could, telling him that if he had questions he should call Adam and not her. 

Adam drove one-handed, which normally made her nervous, but she was far too nervous about everything else for it to be more than a raindrop in the ocean of her fears. He leaned his elbow on the window and distractedly rubbed his mouth with his gloved fingers hard, as if it hurt, while he relentlessly scanned the passing, dark streets. When they crossed the lake and started passing the large, darkened houses on the south shore he grew even tenser. 

“After this is done I am taking you home. I will walk you to the door, and you are not to come out at night under  _ any  _ fucking circumstances. Any.”

“What about my neighbors? My family?”

Before he could answer, or more likely, not answer, he pulled up to the gate of one of the houses, one with lights on. When they reached the door Nekhii opened it before they could knock, wearing a very heavy sweater and jeans, his dark, handsome features rueful. “Welcome. Is it always this cold here? I cannot see how you can bear it,” he said, taking Kay’s hand and leading her in off of the wide, leaf-strewn porch. 

Then he turned to Adam, bowing slightly, “Please, enter. Feel free to remove your gloves if you wish.”

“I think not,” he said ungraciously.

Most of the furniture in the house was modern, expensive, and didn’t suit the Victorian building. Marlowe was waiting in the library. “Sad, isn’t it? These beautiful built-ins wasted.”

The shelves were mostly empty, of books at any rate. Apart from one shelf that had some old dictionaries, a computer guide, and a handful of erotic thrillers and spy novels, they were filled with local bric-a-brac - fake Native art, Holstein cows in various mediums and the like, as well as framed family photos, DVDs, and CDs. 

Everything in the room faced an enormous television. 

Adam slipped off his gloves, mumbling something about there not being anything that he  _ could _ pick up in a room like that. 

“Sit, sit. Nekhii, please bring the refreshments.” Marlowe sat in a recliner and motioned for Adam and Kay to take the loveseat. 

Nekhii went to the small, rolling bar and came back with a tray holding two rocks glasses with what was probably whiskey, and two tiny sherry glasses with … blood. 

To Kay’s surprise, Adam quickly took one rather than questioning the provenance of it, then looked at Nekhii. “Yes, it’s mine,” he said as easily as if they were having a dinner party and he had baked the rolls himself. “Normally Kit and I do things the …  _ old fashioned _ way, but since Mr. Clarke prefers to be more civilized, the glasses.”

Marlowe took the other glass, and waited for Kay and Nekhii to each take up a whiskey, then stood, “I saw the news today. About that innocent creature that was butchered. I blame myself, for not anticipating Phillipe thoroughly enough. I blame myself for every wasteful, cruel death that has taken place at his hands since Eve died. If I had not been weak, let myself waste away to a frail shadow of myself through foul blood and bad company, I would have put an end to his timeless life there and then.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that. He’s the one who did those terrible things, not you,” Kay said, even if she wasn’t sure if she cared for him very much.

“Ah, pretty Proserpina, your human morality is charming, but this is a business for monsters.” He raised his glass to Adam. “To Phillipe’s true death.”

“And Ava’s,” Adam gritted out.

“The Bad Seed is here too?” Marlowe asked.

“Yes,” Adam stood too, “I smelled her in the  _ fucking _ store.” Then he drained the glass.

And fell back onto the loveseat as if someone had kicked his legs out from under him, his eyes rolled back into his head, a look of pleasure on his face so acute that Kay felt herself blushing and getting more turned on than seemed sensible under the current circumstances. “What-” he tried to speak but words seemed beyond him. If he had breathed he would have been panting.

Kay gave a surreptitious glance to the front of his tight jeans and was relieved that he didn’t seem to be hard, just somewhere between bliss and buzz.

“Nekhii is my fountain of youth, you might say. The secret to my rejuvenation, though there are still too many wrinkles on this visage for my vanity’s pleasure,” Marlowe said, taking a smaller sip and moaning softly.

“There was always a family legend that my great, great, and perhaps again great grandmother was so beautiful she seduced a Marid to save her family’s fishing fleet from being sunk in a great storm. It gives my blood a little something extra,” Nekhii said with a smile, gently touching the rim of his glass to the one that hung limply in Kay’s hand. “And,” he kissed Marlowe’s cheek, “I find those lines dashing. I would not see you lose a one of them.”

“Flattery has ever been my weakness,” Marlowe said, sitting down so he could finish the rest of his drink. 

“You shouldn’t have given him that without warning him,” Kay said, turning to Adam, touching his arm softly. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” he said, his beautiful voice slightly dreamy. “Better than fine.” When his eyes focused on her he seemed a little in shock. He opened his mouth, then closed it, the shock retreating, “Do you have a plan?” he asked Kit, who had finished his drink but was less debilitated by it, probably since he drank it regularly.

“Always, darling, always. But you won’t like it.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	18. I Can’t Hardly Stand It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marlowe has a plan, Adam has a conniption, Kay has a beer

“Absolutely fucking not!” Adam snarled at Marlowe, shooting to his feet, fangs descending as his graceful hands turned into massive fists.

Marlowe raised a brow, “My dear, I know that even in my vastly improved condition you are still stronger and faster than I, yet I have the mind of a poet and the heart of a murderer. You have the mind of a trouvier and the heart of a lover, though you pretend otherwise.”

“Fuck you, Kit! I should have known you would have something reckless and mad in mind, you conniving bastard!” His accent thickened and aged and his voice was that of a man who had shouted defiance on more than one ancient battlefield.

Kay was so taken aback by the suddenness and intensity of Adam’s rage she hadn’t noticed that Nekhii had gotten up from his seat until he leaned over the back of the sofa beside her. “It might be a good time to adjourn to the kitchen for another drink and a snack. I’ve seen it when two of these old guys start fighting. The next thing you know they are arguing about something all of the way back in the Napoleonic era and then we are up to dawn and nothing gets decided.”

Nodding, Kay picked up her purse and followed him out of the room, shoulders down, feeling like a slinking cartoon cat crossing a living floor towards a birdcage. When they were in the relative safety of the fashionable but not very practical kitchen Nekhii offered her that sunny smile that was clearly how he distracted people. “You didn’t have any of your drink. I should have guessed you weren't a whiskey drinker. Wine? Tequila?”

“Beer. Please, if you have it.”

“I have everything.” He rooted in the fridge and grabbed two beers.

“That story about the Marid was a lie,” she said, taking a can from him before he could pour it into a glass. “Is that what you and Marlowe have in common, being liars? Why would you lie about something like that to begin with?”

“Because it was funny? Because people want explanations for things? Your Adam -”

“He is not my Adam.”

“-is the type who needs a reason. It’s why he believed Kit’s lie about Shakespeare. How much more reasonable that a genius and monster of Marlowe’s caliber wrote those sublime and knowing works than a glove-maker’s son from Bumblefuck-on-Avon? Musicians are mathematicians at heart, and vis-a-versa, so they are always looking for solutions.”

“My mother is a mathematician,” she corrected him, annoyed at the incorrect generalization as well as having to think about her mother. “She has many faults, but she never assumes there is a discoverable cause. Just more complex problems. It might be the only likable thing about her, and that she makes very nice blackberry pies.”

The smile grew wider, and he leaned against the sink crossing his arms. “How did you know? I mean it was clearly a lie. There  _ are _ no such thing as djinn, or really any supernatural beings. Just vampires. Well, and witches of course.”

Kay shrugged and pulled herself up onto the island since there weren’t any chairs, then took a sip before answering. “I have found that most people lie about things all of the time. Apart from Adam. I mean,” she frowned, “I suppose if you think about it his entire existence is a lie, but other than that he can’t be bothered to lie. I like that about him. Very much. There are ghosts, too,” she added.

He ignored that.

“The truth, then, is I have no idea why my blood is different, and I don’t know that I care. Kit was right about you and your Adam-”

“Not my Adam.”

“-that if he brought up using you as bait for Phillipe since he seems to be aware of you now, probably from that bloodsucker that attacked you a few weeks ago, Adam would lose his shit and you would eventually agree, even if you would be terrified and unhappy about it. Which is why he came up with the rest of his plan.”

She kicked her booted heels against the lower cabinets, knowing she was probably leaving marks. She would have to remember to grab the sponge from the sink and wipe them down before she left. 

“I haven’t agreed to anything yet.” Then she thought about what he had said, “What rest of his plan?”

Kay was aware that it had grown much quieter in the living room.

Adam was blind with fury and only their long friendship and Kit’s dearness to Eve kept him from ripping his head clean off.

“You seem to forget that your Kay is an autonomous creature, as fully endowed with the right to her own choices as you, my friend, and she was willing to hear me out,” Marlowe said. “Indeed, I would hazard that she knows her own mind at the moment far better than you know yours.”

“Of course she would consider it! Kay has more fucking morality in her little finger than you have in your whole wrinkled skin, you old fraud! She’s just trying to keep anyone else getting killed.”

But though he wanted to stay angry, Kit’s words cut Adam’s legs from under him, and he sat back on the couch hard enough to make something in it crack. Kay was her own person and he had no business or right to interfere with what she wanted to do.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to. Fuck that idea.

“There are other ways to lure him out.”

Kit looked at him with weary, affectionate eyes. “You tried that before. In Paris after he killed that pianist you had taken under your wing. Beautiful lad, what was his name?”

“Qiu.”

“Qiu. Autumn. Beautiful name. Beautiful lad.” Marlowe sighed and poured a few more drops of blood into their glasses from a little silver flask, handing one to Adam. “To Qiu. To Eve. To your Kay for having a good heart.”

Suddenly he was exhausted. Exhausted with his past. With his mourning. With his own gloom. Though Adam knew that he had no control over the last of these - he had danced to depression’s tune since he was a boy and they called it melancholy and thought it was romantic - he could, perhaps, move just a little farther down the road from the other two.

Taking the glass but not drinking, Adam stared into the delicate crystal cup at Nekhii’s blood, while Marlowe sipped and continued talking. “Phillipe is a monster’s monster, clever and vile and more so by the year. I have hunted him and come up with nothing. But he still wants to punish you, to take from you. For taking Eve from him.” He snorted and set down the glass, which gave a soft ring on the top of the hideous metal coffee table. “As if Eve were ever his or would have been for that matter. The Queen of the Fairies had better taste. Of course, he also never forgave her for taking you from him, too.”

Adam couldn’t resist taking a sip. Prepared and not as thirsty, it still rolled down his throat like opium and honey warm from the hive. “He may be, but Ava isn’t. I know I could find her.”

“Of course you could. The incompetents that pass for the constabulary in this town could probably find little sister.”

“We’d just have to find where the  _ hipsters  _ are going this week and I’m sure we’d find her draining some poor fucker in the unisex loo.”

Kit nodded, “Certainly.”

“Then why don’t we? Let’s go find her now. I have a few words fo-” Though it seemed like the best idea in the world, Nekhii’s blood filling him with enthusiasm, but when Adam stood the room tilted and he found himself tilting with it.

Quicker than even he could move himself, Kit was next to him, holding him up, “By our good lord and savior you are heavy for a beanpole, maestro,” his old friend said. 

It had been centuries since Adam had felt sick, but now he did, his stomach heaving, yet he was too worn to vomit. Every vein in his body seemed to be pumping melatonin rather than the blood of others.

“You poisoned me,” he slurred out.

“Not at all. Drugged, my dear, drugged. If it works on you it means it will work on Phillipe.” Kit hoisted him into his arms. The edges of Adam’s vision frayed and darkened, no matter how hard he fought. “You know that taking Ava will do us no good. Phillipe couldn’t give two limp fucks about her. When he realized she would never be his new Eve he lost interest in her as anything but a tool and a toy. Like poor Jean.”

Marlowe was going to use Kay. He was going to offer her to Phillipe. 

A brief surge of anger gave him the strength to push away and fall on the floor in a heap. 

“What did you do?” He heard Kay cry out, and then she was holding him, his head on her lap as she stroked his head 

It felt good. 

“Adam? Look at me, what did he give you?” Her light hair brushed his lips as she turned to scowl like a fierce hare at Kit, “What did you give him?”

“Nothing of lasting harm, I swear.” 

Kit sounded far away. She was wonderfully warm. Had he ever told her how warm she was? How much he wanted her to warm him all of the time, most especially when he ran away from her?

“You’re a liar.” It was a statement. Kay always knew the truth.

Adam tried to tell her not to go with Kit. Not to sacrifice herself. To beg her. To beg and bargain, but his tongue was swollen and his lips stiff and he realized whatever Kit had given him was about to put him under.

“I am. All writers are liars. Yet not all liars lie with every breath. Some do, but not me. Now let me get our gloomy prince into the basement. He will be safer there from Phillipe’s murderous bile.”

There was something… Kay was kissing his forehead, “Are you sure you can stop this person? If I help you draw him out?” She sounded like she had made up her mind about something.

“No!” Adam shouted.

In his mind. 

“Please, please, don’t Kay, don’t please, I can’t bear it. I- don’t do this, don’t. I won’t survive,” he babbled, still only in his head, until the darkness worked its way inwards and he could no longer hear their voices, or feel Kay’s warmth. 

It took until midnight for Marlowe to go over his plan, refining it with Kay’s local knowledge and the more esoteric information Nekhii had gathered using his computer and bribery skills earlier in the day. “The authorities in this town understand nothing about  _ baksheesh _ , I cannot believe how cheap I got off,” he said. 

Kay was freezing. Her heart felt squeezed. Every little sound made her jump. The desire to call a cab and go straight to her parent’s house warred and lost to her fear of bringing any danger to them and Malcolm who was staying there. That she had an even greater fear of something happening to Adam made her feel disloyal but that didn’t change the feeling itself. 

He was the most important thing to her and that was what it was.

Clutching her sweater tighter about her she spent most of the time they brainstormed pacing. “How do we know Adam is going to be ok. Did you test that drug on yourself first?” she snipped, knowing the answer already.

Marlowe, with his deceptively genial old face gave her a kindly smile and lied, “Of course. Now, are you quite certain that this club is where the  _ au courant  _ of your university’s trendy dilettante’s gather?”

“Just because I’m not a hipster doesn’t mean I don’t know any. Genie who I work with and her boyfriend love that place.”

“Excellent, then I think we can be off.”

“After last night’s … murder,” unable to stop herself Kay touched her own throat, “I’m sure there won’t be many people out. Plus it was a holiday yesterday.”

_ Was Halloween only yesterday? _ she thought.

“And I am quite certain it will be packed to the rafters. Nekhii, if you would bring the car around?” He offered his cheek to his lover/supplier who gave him a quick kiss on his way out, offering Kay a comforting pat on the shoulder as well.

When he was gone, Marlowe took off the glasses that kept the predatory quality of his eyes hidden and leaned forward, elbows on knees, gesturing to the couch across from him, “Please sit. I promise you that you shall not perish, nor even be harmed. I would not rob Adam of another love in this long and often lonely existence. Tonight as evidence otherwise aside, he is very dear to me. And Eve would never forgive me.”

Despite herself, Kay sat and even sipped some of the whiskey that was left in Nekhii’s glass, trying not to gag on the taste of burnt sugar, brush fire smoke, and paint thinner. At least it made her shoulders relax enough that she noticed for the first time how sore they were. Almost as sore as Kit’s … bullshit made her heart.

“Adam doesn’t love me. I mean, he might love me as a friend, but he’s not in love with me. He’s still in love with Eve,” she took another drink and contrary to popular fiction it tasted worse, not better, and burned even hotter going down but left her still cold. “Even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be in love with me. I’m too … I’m too literal for him. Too sensible. Not … I’m not Eve. I’m just a better class of zombie.”

“Oh my darling lass,” Marlowe said, not smiling, “how do you  _ not know  _ that Adam is in love with you? Painfully so, certainly, because that is how our dark-haired boy does. Painfully in love and most like for rather longer than you would imagine possible. You’re a classic pairing. Classical, even. Our very own broodingly chthonic Hades - our Ἀΐδης Ἀγήσανδρος - carrying your lovely, Persephone self, Κόρη, the sweet, vegetable maid of spring with your bountiful, summer breasts, down to his lonely underworld.”

Kay hugged herself harder, “That’s all very pretty, but he doesn’t want me down there, except for maybe a little fun” She almost gagged on the last word. “Not really. He still loves Eve.”

She said it again. She told  _ herself _ again.

“And always shall, darling. Would you want him to cease to love her just because she is gone? Or would you rather have a lover whose heart will never waiver where he loves?  _ Who bears it out even to the edge of doom _ ?” Marlowe tilted his head at her, someone managing to look cheeky yet sincere.

“That’s very pretty, and exactly what everyone wants. It has been ever since  _ Shakespeare _ wrote it,” she snapped back at him. 

Before he could respond a roar of frustrated rage came from the basement, followed by a crack of wood that had to be a door giving way, and then from outside a honk. Kit grabbed her arm and pulled her up from the couch, “My dear William also wrote ‘all's well that ends well’ so let us hope he was right about that, too. Come on.”

“I forgot to clean the cabinets in the kitchen,” she said , as she grabbed her purse on the way out.

“Indeed,” Marlowe intoned, and Kay thought,  _ That eyeroll looks  _ just _ like Adam’s. _ _ It must be a vampire thing _ , as he whisked her into the idling Jaguar and then away, deep into the night.

  
  



	19. If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.- Oscar Wilde

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kay and Nekhii go clubbing.

“Wasn’t this Adam’s plan to begin with?” Kay whispered to Nekhii.

Not that she needed to. The so-very-happening club they were standing in was so crowded that she was certain not even someone with hearing as acute as she knew a vampire’s to be would hear anything over the bass thump and the many, many voices.

Marlowe had been right, sadly. Rather than keeping people in, the disgusting murder of poor Emma Nowak had filled the bars. Including this place, which was a pop-up in an industrial park out in what used to be farmland. Kay had no idea there were places like this around her hometown. 

“Any community this small that has more than a dozen art galleries and seventeen coffeehouses is going to have a place like this,” Nekhii had said when they had stood in line to get in. 

The doorman had looked askance at Kay’s black turtleneck sweater and pink plaid skirt, but Nekhii’s dazzling smile, expensive trousers, and gorgeous, dark face were more than enough to get them into the surprisingly well-lit space. Little had been done in the way of decor to make it not look like the machine shop it used to be, other than the bringing in of a distressed steel bar, matching tables, and a DJ’s booth. 

Now they were standing at the end of the bar, waiting. Though he was given a respectful distance, she was being jostled rather regularly by very fashionable people - shockingly fashionable for a college town, she thought - many of whom would see her face and give a horrified double-take, rushing off to tell their friends that the dead girl’s twin was there. 

“Not exactly,” Nekhii answered while looking over her shoulder to flirt a little with a good-looking, very young-looking man, who Kay recognized as a friend of Genie’s whose family had moved to town from Korea in the last few years, Choe something. “Adam’s plan was for him and Marlowe to come here and find Ava. Which would either spook her so she ran, or they would catch her and Phillipe would abandon her and wait for another chance to kill your boyfriend.”

Kay would have laughed, thinking of how hilariously furious the word ‘boyfriend’ would make Adam if she hadn’t been scared to death. Instead, she continued to not drink the very expensive cocktail Nekhii had bought her and asked, “Have you ever met him, or seen him?”

Her back hurt from how tight her muscles were.

“Phillipe?” He finished sending a drink to Choe. “Fuck no. If Kit and I had managed to get anywhere near him either he’d be dead or we would be.”

“You seem just as serious about catching him as Marlowe.”

“It’s important to Kit, so it’s important to me. I love him and he’s the most remarkable person I’ve ever known and certainly ever will. His losing Eve almost killed him. Even though I met him after she was gone I feel like I know her from his stories. I would love to have known her.”

Kay sighed. She couldn’t even resent Eve. For one thing, she was dead. For another, everything Adam had said about her, and even more importantly how he said what he said, as well as her significance to Marlowe and how he remembered her, even the beauty of Alice Sharpe’s portrait of her, all spoke of someone remarkable beyond compare. 

_A nonpareil_. 

None of which didn’t mean she wasn’t heartsick. 

Adam was never going to forgive her for agreeing to Marlowe’s plan. Or she might die. 

She looked up at the girders that laced the ceiling and tried to control her shaking hands and the prickles of heat that made her skin hurt. She could die so easily, but she wasn’t sure if she could live with anyone else dying in her place. 

“We need to make you more visible. With this many bodies so close together Ava might not be able to make out your scent,” Nekhii said, taking her drink from her hand and then leading her to the claustrophobia-inducing dance floor. 

Even though all she heard was the barest thud of the music it was enough to dance to, or at least as much dancing as could be done with so many bodies pressing around her. Kay had never been out dancing. The guys she had dated had not been the dancing type, and being touched, even by accident, by so many people was nerve-wracking for someone for whom had lived most of her life around people who didn’t do casual physical contact. Though she had always liked dancing she had only really done it at weddings, and even then just with her father or one of her brothers, or when she was alone. 

At least if she died she would have gone dancing - in a manner of speaking - with someone once. Sadly, looking at Nekhii where he moved gracefully a foot away from her, never touching, it wasn’t what she hoped for.

She felt clumsy and thick-headed and absolutely refused to think about Adam. 

“Are you alright?” Nekhii shouted. “You are so pale it’s like you’ve already been sucked dry and put up wet.”

Despite herself, Kay laughed.

The song changed from whatever was playing to something more trancey and slow. Even more bodies pressed themselves into the tiny floor. Kay felt greasy with fear-sweat under her clothing as she tried to find a way to move, a way to breathe, with so many people vying for the same tiny amounts of space and maybe even air. She felt like she was dancing with everyone there, which made her want to do the simplest thing which would be to fall to the ground and crawl away. 

But she made herself stay. Moving her feet, moving her hips, hoping she was smiling, wanting to go home and shower under water hot enough to burn her to the bone and cry.

Nekhii shouted something to her, and he tried to keep a hand on her waist, which then slipped away to her arm, then her hand, then the wave of bodies forced them apart and she felt his fingertips try to grasp her’s, and then nothing. 

Just over the tops of the beautifully coiffed and or interesting hat-wearing heads, Kay could see him still shouting. And then, oddly, he seemed to be gone.

As much as she could, Kay hopped up and down trying to see him, but there were too many tall people between them. Also, with the combination of her breasts and her boots hopping wasn’t one of her strong suits.

“Lose your friend, little girl?” 

The voice was deep and rich, like a sickeningly sweet fruitcake, with a faint touch of the accent she remembered from an academic conference in Paris that her mother had invited her to join her at, since her assistant couldn’t go. 

No breath tickled her ear, even though the voice was much too close.

Kay didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Where she had been ready to steam alive now all of the sweat was cold and slimy. “Phillipe? Right?”

“Ah, my fame precedes me. Did my beautiful Jem tell you about me, or was it that old whore Marlowe?” His tone was light.

Kay squared her shoulders and made herself turn, a hand out, “How do you do? I’m Kay. It seems my fame precedes me, too-. Oh, dear.” 

The crowd had moved to give them room. They seemed to do it without knowing they were, moving as one outward. It reminded Kay of the little kid’s science experiment where you sprinkle pepper in water and stick a bar of soap in the middle, making the pepper move away. 

Phillipe was the soap.

Because of the room she was able to take in all of Phillipe, from the boots that gave him a few extra inches to loom over her with, up his long legs, to his dark gold curls. He was gorgeous, with pale blue eyes and dark brows, and the kind of face that made people do really stupid things. Which was what Kay did next.

“You don’t look like a vampire.” she blurted out.

Rather than rolling his eyes he raised one of those perfect, dark brows and frowned a little, “I beg your pardon?”

“I mean,” she dropped her arm since it was clear he wasn’t going to shake, “you actually look _exactly_ like a vampire. In a movie. Or on a t.v. show. But you don’t look like Adam or Marlowe.”

He cracked half of a smile. “It’s the hair.” Reaching up, he wrapped a leather-gloved finger in one of his own curls. “There is more than one family under our order. Genus and species as well, of course. Since _Jem_ is for whatever reason ensorcelled by your charms,” he stared frankly at her breasts, making it clear what he thought those charms were, “I will assume you are a bright little zombie and understand what that means.” He sproinged his curl free and booped her nose like she was a puppy. Under the coppery smell of blood that both Adam and Marlowe had as well, there was a hospital room odor to him. 

Like he was a room in which many people had died.

“Jem?”

The too-sweet smile he gave her was offset by a sneer. “You probably know him as _Adam_ . Adam the _artiste_ ,” he gave a little finger-wave. “The grieving widower hiding his face from… well, the sun, obviously, but from all of creation, skulking in his pit! Pretending to be a sensitive flower too good to suck straight from the teat like the rest of us. Swanning about like he’s not a fucking monster, too.” He grabbed her throat, and squeezed just hard enough to make her vision start to go black around the edges. “ _Jem_. Call. Him. Jem.” The last was said with a gentle implacability.

No one seemed to see, or care, what was happening to her. Kay’s heart was beating fast enough to make her sick. She was going to die here, surrounded by trendy strangers. 

“Jem.” She formed the name with lips, not having enough breath to speak.

“Yes,” he nodded, smiling sunnily again, now tenderly stroking her neck, using it to hold her up as she heaved for breath, “Jem. Good girl.”

There was a physical pressure to his malice. Those pale eyes took her apart and were unimpressed, leaving Kay feeling more alone than she had ever felt in her life.

Though she couldn’t lift her hand to wipe them away she could feel tears start to slowly crawl down her face. 

Phillipe was kind enough to wipe them away for her.

She wanted a gun filled with wooden bullets. She wanted to be anywhere but there. She wanted her sociopathic mother who wouldn’t be afraid, couldn’t be afraid.

Kay wanted Adam. To hide her face inside of his leather jacket, face pressed to his still, cold chest, while he held her. He would smell of copper, too, but also of ink and dust and violets, everything she loved.

“You’re fidgeting. No, you’re trembling, aren’t you? Confidentially, if you are looking for that handsome creature you came with to show up, I wouldn’t bother. Ava is probably playing with him right now. She tends to break her toys, sadly. Which is why, after her blunder with that admitted doppelganger of yours I knew I couldn’t let her play with you.”

Moving with vampiric speed and strength, Phillipe had her by the waist, through the crowd, out the door, and away fast enough to tear the wind from her lungs. 

So her scream for help was silent.

No matter what else she was, Nekhii thought, Ava was one hell of a kisser. 

Her petite body was hard and eager against him, and she moved her hips with boneless ease. If it weren’t for his knowing exactly who she was, and that she was even colder than the black autumn air around them he might have almost enjoyed himself.

When he had lost sight of Kay he had started to panic, which was unusual for him. Nekhii had seen more of human horrors by the time he was ten than any child should, and from that point on, more than enough supernatural ones as well. When he had woken in the El'Arafa cemetery after his father had hastily buried him in the rocky ground not more than a handful of meters from where his family lived in the City of the Dead, he had assumed he was a Ghul.

The old woman who had dug him up had laughed in his face. “Ghul is what we call ourselves, to scare away the humans. Come on.”

After that, he had learned as much as he could about supernatural horrors. And beauties.

It was part of the reason he could be stone-cold sober and still make out a creature he knew to be a bloodsucker in a parking lot, whilst propped up against a dumpster that needed to be emptied. Needed it bad. When you grew up living in an occupied mausoleum and were buried alive before puberty it took a lot to get you worked up.

Nekhii thought he was past having nerves. But losing Kay was bad. 

Bad for him, bad for Kit, bad for the plan. And bad for Kay, of course. He liked her and her earnest honesty. He couldn’t imagine any human less suited for interacting with the Subrosa world of the unrestful dead, but she was game and loyal. Nekhii admired that. 

“You’re too interesting to be in the Heartland,” Ava said with an aroused giggle, dipping into his mouth. He stroked her apricot mane as he felt her fangs growing against his tongue. Looking up at him, he could almost make out her eyes behind her little, round sunglasses. She grasped the front of his jacket in her little, gloved hands, pulling herself up. Moving slowly, teasing, flirting, until she moved faster than he could see.

“You, too, baby,” he managed to finish saying before her teeth were deep in his flesh.

Marlowe knew something would go wrong. After all, he was the one who had given Von Moltke that quote about battle plans not surviving the meeting with the enemy. 

The real strategy came in his ability to guess _how_ it would go wrong. 

From where he lurked amidst the scrubby trees on the far edge of the industrial park his night vision gave him a view of the front and back of the club. 

When the alert came from Nekhii’s phone that meant he had lost track of Kay, Kit wasn’t too worried. When the second alert came that meant Nekhii had found Ava, he was mildly concerned, especially when he saw them leave the back of the club to have a sordid little rendezvous by the trash. 

Kit liked the sordid, and he didn’t mind watching if Nekhii felt like indulging in a little cunt every now and then, being more flexible than he was in that regard, but Ava was a traitorous beast. She turned his stomach.

And now he would have a chance to do the same for her. 

He smiled and watched. And later realized that was when Phillipe made away with Kay.

Adam loved to drive. Had from the first time he had gotten behind the wheel of Eve’s Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic back in ‘37. He had resisted the combustion engine for decades only to be seduced by the most sensuous car in history. From that point, he had been lost to the decadence of four wheels on the road. 

He had treated every car he had owned with respect and love.

Now he was grinding metal, pushing his specially modified Jag to do things it wasn’t meant to do, going off-road with her even. Normally the shrieks of her undercarriage scraping on who knew the fuck what would make him wince and pull over instantly to see what had happened. 

Tonight he didn’t care if he had to leave it a burning pile at the side of the road as long as it got him where he was going. 

Not that he knew where he was going, exactly. Just somewhere back in town proper. 

He had finished busting his way out of the basement of Marlowe’s McMansion, which had better quality wood involved in it’s making than he expected. Since they were long gone he took the time to kick out a couple of the balusters from the stairway to the second floor - they were a perfect fit for his hand and would go easily into Phillipe and Ava’s chests, and Kit’s for that matter. 

As he drove one-handed, blowing stop lights and signs, taking driveways so he could cut across the backyards of the shitty subdivision on this far side of the lake, Adam called Kay and Kit and Kay and Kit and over and over. After the first message he left for each, screaming like a madman at one and begging the other, he just hit redial over and over, hanging up when the voicemail picked up, and hitting redial again.

He had just reached the outskirts of downtown, having to slow down since the last thing he needed was to get into an accident and have to shake off the zombie authorities, when he got a text from an unknown, international number. Nekhii, probably.

_Bad news And good news. Which do you want first?_

“Fuck you, Kit,” he growled at the screen, feeling the shitty little thing start to crumple in his hands, Adam had to stop himself. It was hard to calm down when you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t take in air slowly and let it out slower still, when your blood wasn’t really your blood and your heart didn’t race and there was no adrenaline building. 

When all of your stress and terror were purely mental and based on hard fucking facts calming down was never an option.

Before he could respond he received another text. Kay.

Adam pulled the car over, shaking. 

Kay never texted him. She knew he hated texts and so stopped sending them to him, even though they were her preferred mode of communication.

“I can have a fully formed thought and then edit it,” she had said, trying to explain why to him. ”Everyone is always… confused by some of the things I say, or what I prioritize. With a text, I can fix that before anyone gives me a funny look. Or rolls their eyes?” 

She had been trying to make him laugh. 

He had been tuning one of his guitars and hadn’t really been listening, of course, because he was an asshole.

Kay was the one who had taken the selfie, which was a pathetic relief. Though she looked unharmed her lips were terribly pale and her head was turned slightly so he couldn’t see her eyes. 

Over her shoulder Phillipe gave a wide, joyous smile and was throwing a peace sign, his arm wrapped around Kay’s upper body so she was pressed against him. There was no message. 

He didn’t need one. He could tell from the scrap that could be seen of the room they were in where they were.

Flitcraft’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The City of the Dead, the the Qarafa, is a series of cemeteries covering over four miles in the hills just outside of Cairo. It is believed as many as a half a million people live around and squat inside of the mausoleums and makeshift buildings.


	20. They Only Learn When It's Too Late

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam, Kay, and Phillipe hang out at the bookstore

Kay had learned to be small when she was a child. In a family full of big boys, most of them older than she and a few of them prone to wildness when puberty and enthusiasm and sometimes the need to stim all came together at once, or when one or more of them were just being assholes, it was a good skill to have. Not that any of her brothers ever did any damage on purpose. 

They were doing what they had to do.

Being small, pulling in her own legs and arms and energy, was good for her and sometimes for them. Being small meant stilling everything in her. Not to be invisible. Just insignificant for as long as she needed. Not really thinking, not really focusing on anything. As much as was possible.

Sitting in the dark on the far end of the gently sagging couch in the main room of Flitcraft’s she tried to be very small indeed.

Not that it mattered. Phillipe was talking expansively as he walked about the store destroying things. A delicate old collection of poetry was ripped from its cover. A small bookcase that hung over the door to the bathroom was knocked off the wall and splintered beneath his feet. The glass top of the counter was a mass of cracks, barely holding itself in the frame. 

She prayed to herself that he wouldn’t find Cobweb. The cat was smarter than she was, he knew to stay away from vampires.

All of the while he walked around the store, holding a paperback of the collected works of Christopher Marlowe, calmly declaiming as he did. 

“ _ On Hellespont, guilty of true love's blood, / In view and opposite two cities stood _ .” He looked up and smiled at nothing before going on, destroying the countertop with an elbow..

“ _ Her kirtle blue, whereon was many a stain, / Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain _ .” Too bad you aren’t in blue,  _ ma bichette _ , it would be perfect.” 

Salty nausea flooded her mouth. Kay swallowed it back down, her eyes wet.

Raising a hand to knock down the little case and then trodding on it, he continued, “ _ And oftentimes into her bosom flew, / About her naked neck his bare arms threw.” _ He lay the book open on a shelf so he could take tear leather from paper with a sound that was almost like a shriek, throwing it at Kay’s head just to make her flinch.

On and on, hurting the store, reading until he closed the book, saying, “ _ Enamour'd of his beauty had he been. / His presence made the rudest peasant melt _ … Just like our Jem.” He pointed to the store window with the book. 

Adam’s little sports car, which had looked so loved and cared for only a few hours before was a terrible mess. One of the headlights was out, and the other was aimed wrong, not that he needed them to see, but it was still rather sad. The glossy dark green paint on the hood had long scratches so deep Kay could see them even from the distance. Though he was moving fast she could tell that at least one of the tires had something wrong with it.

He drove up onto the sidewalk, braking so close to the store that she thought the car was going to come through the window. When Kay jumped up from the couch, afraid she was going to be killed by Adam’s driving before Phillipe’s fangs, she was grabbed and held by one big, cold hand around her neck.

“Hold that chin up,” Phillipe whispered in her ear, biting it hard enough to bruise but not to bleed. “You have nice posture for a girl with such bovine tits. Show it off, make your new  _ papa _ proud before his nice friend Jem. Papa to be, that is.”

Kay wanted to throw up on his expensive shoes, but with her head being held like it was she couldn’t. 

Adam moved so fast that the door of the car was open, the door of the store as well, and he was standing a few feet from them without her seeing him approach. Seeing them, he froze with the preternatural stillness of a creature that did not need to breathe. In one hand he held a what looked like part of a bannister at his side, and apart from the way his gloved hand squeezed it he might have been a mannequin at a goth store. 

“Kay-” he started to say something. It was nice to hear her name in his voice, soft and charged. Nice, even if it didn’t help anything or make her less afraid.

“Jem,” Phillipe said, “you are even more exquisite in the flesh than in memory. It’s been much too long.” His tone was light and conversational. “And before you do anything out of character, such as doing  _ anything at all _ ,” his voice turned to a snarl, “please know that I can break her neck and leave her alive and paralized from the neck down quicker than you could ever hope to reach me. So let’s get rid of the weapon, shall we?”

Adam looked down at the stake, and then at Kay. She tried to beg him with her eyes not to do anything stupid, but she never really understood how that was supposed to work when she read about it in a book. Fortunately he dropped it anyway, “I’m sorry Kay. I should never have let you near Marlowe tonight.” 

The way he looked at her, no one had ever looked at her before, and she had no idea what it meant.

“You don’t have the right to stop me from doing anything. But thank you,” she said, “for wanting to be the boss of me in a nice way.”

He laughed. One hard, painful chuckle.

For a moment Phillipe seemed disappointed. At least Kay thought so. Being held as she was she couldn’t see much other than the part of his shoulder. Then he laughed, and laughed, and his hold on her grew harder, until Kay was afraid he was going to kill her by mistake. “Oh my god,  _ Râleur _ ! You really have feelings for this zombie, don’t you, Jem? You, who had the most divine, enchanted woman to walk this earth marry you, three fucking times,” at that point bloody spittal started hitting the side of her face. “You stole her from me, Jem. You stole yourself! Eve was supposed to be mine! You were supposed to be mine! There are some lovely shackles on that case near the door. Made just for you. Put them on behind your back and sit on the fucking ground or I am going to snap her neck!”

One of the only things Nekhii liked about the town was the forests surrounding it. Though the cold could go fuck itself the turned leaves of fall and deep stands of trees were like a fairytale for someone who grew up in Egypt. 

Although at night there wasn’t as much to enjoy.

They were also nice for having a secluded place to tie up a prisoner and not have to worry about anyone hearing the screams. Of course, a vampire wouldn’t scream for help. They always thought they were going to get out of trouble somehow. Perhaps it was a side effect of defying the Gods of Death for so long.

Kit slapped Ava, “Time to wake, feral child.” 

She blinked and moaned, “What did you do to me? Where are we?” Wiggling around in the ropes that held against the tree, her nose pressed to the rough bark, there was more anger than panic in her voice. “Marlowe? Is that you?”

“Ah, ah,” shook a finger in her face, “I’m the one who asks the questions. So let us start with a simple one, as you are  _ such _ a simple monster, where is Phillipe?”

For a few seconds she didn’t answer, still pulling on the ropes, tearing the little dress she wore, shredding her white tights, “I didn’t know you were into kinky stuff, Marlowe. Or girls!”

Nekhii finished looking at his phone, “Nothing from Kay. We don’t have time for games.”

Kit looked at him, his old, beautiful face implacable. “Should you, or should I?”

“She helped kill your friend.” 

Kit nodded, and reached into his coat, pulling out a number of wooden rods of different lengths and thicknesses, sharpened to points and fire hardened. Predictable as the stars in the sky, Ava betrayed Phillipe before he had to do more than touch her.

“He’s going to turn that prissy librarian! He’s going to turn her and feed Adam to her! Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!”

“Where?” Nekhii asked as Kit stroked one of the wooden tips from just under her eye down her cheek to her chin, leaving a soot mark like a mascara colored tear.

“That fucking bookstore! He had me go in and check it out, check her out!”

They nodded at each other, “We need to get there,” Kit said, slipping the rods back into his pocket. “You drive, I’ll see if I can get Adam. And you, darling,” he kissed the top of Ava’s apricot colored mane. “The sun will be rising in about two hours. It will be slow to reach here, because of the hill over there. Sorry, you can’t see where I am pointing, can you. It’s to the east. When it does it will come through the branches and the leaves. Enough of them have fallen that the sun  _ will  _ reach you, but enough are still there that you will burn slowly. My gift to you for killing my beloved Titania. Goodbye.”

They crunched through the fallen leaves toward where they had left the car, while Ava screamed and begged behind them.

Phillipe had been going on for some time. Alternately raving and cajoling. Flirting with both of them one second and then threatening to kill Kay and rape her body on top of Adam. 

Where Adam sat on the floor, his hands that he had shackled himself behind him and then a chain affixed to the shackles by Phillipe and attached to the counter, he had kind of zoned out on him. It was the same old Phillipe bullshit, centuries old. 

He had been in love with Eve and she was going to save him from himself.

He had been in love with Adam, and he had led him on, never feeling anything for him in the first place.

It was all Adam’s fault for stealing Eve. If he hadn’t then Phillipe wouldn’t have had to try and replace her over and over again. With Jean, who he destroyed. With Ava, whom even he figured out pretty quickly was mad as a fucking hatter. With so many other women who were in so many graves across the world because of Adam. 

It was all Eve’s fault. Seducing Jem, making him into someone different. Making him into Adam who was too pure to ever love Phillipe.

And on and on and  _ fucking _ on. Adam gave himself a headache forcing himself to not roll his eyes.

Rather than listen, Adam looked at Kay. He watched as she sat, curled up on the couch, her legs tucked up, eyes following Phillipe as he paced and raved and sometimes destroyed something else, flinching every time. The light from a streetlamp came through the window, gilding her pale hair. The terror in every line of her body made him hurt. Yet she never said a word or made a sound.

Once she turned to look at him, squaring her shoulders when their eyes met, and trying to smile for him. Another woman in his life that was too good for him, that he couldn’t save.

Finally, Phillipe seemed to be reaching his point. “So, Jem, since you seem able to move on from Eve, perhaps it’s time that I do as well. Stop trying to replace the irreplaceable and settling.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Adam asked, his eyes narrowing.

Phillipe squatted in front of him, “Jem, Jem, you didn’t used to be thick. What’s good enough for you is good enough for me.” He looked over his shoulder to Kay and waved his fingers at her.

Rage exploded through Adam, his dead heart shaking in him. He felt his thin, cold blood pouring out of his wrists as he fought to free himself. “I’ll kill you! I’ll rip your guts out and leave you for the sun!”

“I’m sure you would, Jem. But since she’s going to have to have a first meal, and you know how hungry newborns are, I don’t think you’ll be unalive long enough to do it.” Phillipe reached up and pulled a jagged piece of glass from the shattered countertop, causing the rest of it to fall in and shower Adam’s head and shoulders, and then cut a line from the hollow of his throat down to his navel, slicing his shirt as he went.

The cold glass hurt almost enough to cut Adam’s rage in half.

“Excuse me?”

They both looked to see Kay standing up, straightening her sleeves and pushing a lock of hair behind her ear, and then spoke quickly, “I know that this is going to happen, but can I please say goodbye to Ada- er,  _ Jem  _ before, you, you, you know, do the, biting and turning thing?”

Phillipe stood, a smile on his angelic face, “What nice manners you have.” He walked over and put a finger under her chin, “You are going to be such a good princess for me, aren’t you,  _ ma blonde _ ? I know you are scared now, but when this is over you will never have to be scared again, except of me. Go on, be quick.”

Had it been physically possible Adam would have vomited his liver out right then. Instead he watched as Kay gave Phillipe a weak smile that turned into a cold frown as soon as her back was to him. 

She wasn’t scared, Adam realized, she was furious.

He started talking before she reached him, not caring if Phillipe heard not feeling anything but desperation. There were things he should have said to her, things he should have let himself feel, for ages and ages. Before they met even, when she had worked at the store and he had watched her like a creeper, listened to her waiting on people whilst he lurked and looked at books.

That every strange bit of her was precious. That every inch of her body was a miracle. That even being near her made him feel like - 

Made him feel.

But he couldn’t tell her all of that now. Phillipe was right, when she turned she would be a starving, mad thing, he would be her first meal. That she would never forgive herself was already bad enough, he wouldn’t add to her burden just so he could unburden himself.

Adam spoke as quickly as he could, “I am so fucking sorry. I promise you, you are stronger than Ava or Jean or even he is. So much stronger than he is. He won’t break you. He won’t. Don’t let him make you drink the diseased muck he lives on. And Marlowe won’t stop until you are free and Phillipe is dead! Don’t struggle against the bite because it will tear the vein and you can be dead so quickly. And don’t fight drinking me. Do it. Take every drop. I want you to. I want the last thing I feel to be your teeth. Just hol-”

Kay carefully took to her knees beside him, smoothing her skirt beneath them, and gently took his face in her hands so he had to meet her eyes, serious and calm behind her glasses. With a shake of her head she cut him off, her voice soft and urgent and dear. 

“I have no intention of being a vampire. It wouldn’t suit me  _ at all _ . What would I wear? Let him bite me and drink a little, then distract him,” before pressing her lips to his, opening her mouth, making him fall into her kiss, making him remember what it felt like to have to gasp for breath.

“What?” he barely managed to say, his mind scrambled and scrambling for the purchase of a thought.

Before she could answer Phillipe grabbed her arm, yanking her up. There was a flash of pain on Kay’s face and before he could stop himself Adam nearly dislocated both of his shoulders jerking on the chain that held him, shouting in agony. It wasn’t as bad as being torched by the sun, but it hurt like a motherfucker.

Phillipe laughed briefly, and then put a foot on Adam’s shoulder, using the pain and leverage to put him on his back. “Jem, Jem,” he shook his head, holding Kay close to his side, “You need to watch. It won’t be nearly so fun if you don’t,  _ Râleur _ . You not being there when I bled Eve out nearly  _ ruined _ the experience for me.” 

The word ‘me’ had barely left his lips when he bit deep and hard into Kay’s throat, the sound of her skin and the flesh of her jugular being torn as loud as shotgun fire to Adam. Kay clawed at Phillipe’s arm, not making a sound, clearly in too much pain to talk or even whine. Her nails snagged on his jacket and her entire body shook with pain when he pulled them back out and started to drink. 

Phillipe moaned in pleasure, lifting his head slightly. “Fuck me, Jem, I can’t half blame you. Her blood is ambrosia,” he purred before returning to suck even harder.

Even though Kay was delicious her blood wasn’t especially unusual, Adam frowned. Perhaps it had been so long since Phillipe had drunk for someone who wasn’t deathly ill he had forgotten how good clean blood tasted. 

When Phillipe’s mouth touched her again Kay shuddered in revulsion, looking helplessly towards Adam.

Their eyes met. Adam willed her to keep looking at him. There were certain abilities that a few of their kind had that he had never liked fucking around with, but now he willed Kay to be calm, to not struggle to much. He knew her mind - full of strange angles and great warmth, miriad facts and kindnesses, elegantly simple dreams and obtuse views of all things - and he soothed it, afraid that she would tear herself, that she would bleed out and die. 

If he could have, Adam would have curled up in Kay’s thoughts and never left, let her drain his shell. 

Between the blood loss and Adam’s mental ministrations Kay’s eyes grew glassy and distant. For a moment they were locked together in a perfect place of quiet. 

Then he remembered what she said, and even though he didn’t understand why she wanted it, Adam gave her the distraction. 

Ramming himself back against the counter - which he had installed himself - Adam caused the entire thing to rock, sending the last of the glass, the ancient cash register in the case for show, and the books that were on display in it, crashing to the ground.

“What th-” Phillipe was so startled he pushed Kay away, where she fell limply half on the couch. 

“Leave her alone!” Adam shouted, not sure what else to say. Not sure what the point was.

With his gleaming white cuff Phillipe wiped his mouth, Kay’s streaking down his chin, his throat. “Jem! Really! What an unseemly display. What if someone called the authorities? Would you want their lives on your conscience?”

Adam shrugged.

“Now, where was I? Oh, yes,” he reached over the back of the couch to lift up Kay. For a second he lifted her, but then, as if she had suddenly become heavy, he dropped her and put his hands down to steady himself. “She is quite tasty, Jem.” He lifted a shaking hand to his forehead, “Almost intoxicating.”

Phillipe staggered backwards, catching himself on a bookcase filled with reference books, “What…”

Kay crawled out from behind the couch, her neck dripping, and then seemed to lose any energy, “This floor needs to be mopped,” she muttered. “I need to call the service…”

“Kay! Kay stay awake,” Adam thrashed harder, finally getting the chain attached to the counter to give, though the shackles held. He got his legs under him and stumbled to her at the same moment Phillipe’s gave out and he fell in a heap of expensively clad limbs and dictionaries.

Squatting with his back to Phillipe’s dormant body, Adam blindly rifled through his pockets, impatient to find the key as he watched Kay, her eyelids fluttering as she fought to stay awake. Unshackling himself, he found the fallen baluster, broke it off and impaled Phillipe in seconds, with no fanfare.

Scrambling over to Kay, he lifted her up, listening to her heart. It was steady, and her neck was already starting to heal. Dry sobs wracked him as he held her close, crooning to her, “Kay, oh my darling, Kay, what did you do to him?”

Her big eyes met his and she smiled at him, “Marid blood,” before fainting.

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Phillipe reads is Hero and Leander
> 
> Râleur = grumpy or gloomy one


	21. Turning it Over

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam plays Kay some music.

“Marid Blood” as it turned out was no more the blood of an aquatic Djinn than “Dragon’s Blood” was the blood of a fire breathing, winged reptile. 

Rather it was a concoction - which had a base of  _ Halymenia floresii  _ from the Red Sea - made and drunk by the witches of Cairo to allow them to hunt the undead who infested the City of the Dead, taught to Nekhii by his coven leader when he was a pretty boy who was catnip to all sorts of predators. As little as a dram would transform the drinker’s blood for several days. 

Adam eventually found all of that fascinating, but at the time Marlowe and Nekhii found him in the moments after he had finally gotten rid of Phillipe permanently and was holding Kay, both of them bleeding all over each other he wasn’t in the mood to talk alchemy. 

Had it not been impossible for him to let Kay go, what he would have been in the mood for was ripping Marlowe’s ribcage out and beating Nekhii to fucking death with it. 

As it was, when they entered the store Adam found himself picking her up, their mingled blood leaving a puddle at his feet, staring at them and making a noise that was growl and howl at once. Anger flowed like battery acid through his veins, burning out any last bits of fondness he had for the poet.

Marlowe, stepping carefully over the glass from the counter, gloved hands raised, spoke placatingly, “Yes, of course, you have every right. If sweet Persephone has taken any permanent harm I will walk myself into the dawn -”

Nekhii mumbled, “Like hell you will,” but Kit waved him off without looking away from Adam.

“-yet first let’s make certain she is well. After all, nothing can be wrong if she is well.” 

And because Marlowe had the Devil’s own luck Kay woke up and Adam had more important things to attend to than killing his oldest friend.

She shook her head and pointed at Kit, “Stop quoting _ Shakespeare  _ like it’s something  _ you _ just thought up!” she practically spat, then put her hand to her temple. “Dizzy.”

Adam put his forehead against her shoulder and choked on what he wanted to say. “Kay, you-”

“What? Adam, what are you doing holding me like-,” she looked down at the ground, and then at him. “Put me down.”

“No,” he mumbled against her sweater, feeling dizzy himself. He needed a drink, and not Kay since she’d lost too much blood already, though the smell of her blood was almost overwhelming. 

“The store!” Her voice cracked as she yelled. “Oh my god, the store! Put me down, put me down,” she struggled and squirmed, her eyes wild, and Adam put her down before she could reopen the wounds in her neck. 

Walking in circles she pointed at things that were broken, seemingly unable to speak, before sitting on the ground, almost in the glass from the counter. “I have to call the insurance company and Earl, so I can get fired! I have to fix the-,” after the jolt of emotion her voice started to peter out, “I have to find Cobweb - I have to clean up… God, this hurts…” Gingerly touching the scabs and bruises that were forming on her throat. 

Nekhii took a step towards her, “I can hel-”

Adam shook with fury, “Don’t you touch her.”

With a frown, Kay shook her head at Adam, “Don’t be rude. It’s my neck.” Then she fainted again, straight into Nekhii’s arms and Adam was done. 

“You two fix this,” he said, looking around the mangled store before gently taking Kay from Nekhii but staring at the rather woebegone looking Marlowe. “And don’t you fucking scare the goddamned cat, while you’re about it.”

Then he turned back at the stairs, “Ava?”

“About to meet the sun, I should think,” Kit answered.

Adam wanted to be a better man, but he wasn’t. He imagined his sister-in-law’s terrible death and smiled.

Down in the deep quiet and the intense dark of his apartment, Adam put Kay on his bed before going for his stash. As soon as he set her down she made a small, sad groan and rolled over, clutching a pillow and curling up around it. He needed to clean her neck and take her bloody sweater off. 

He wanted to curl up around her and sleep for a million years. He snorted a helpless laugh of the kind he usually refused to indulge in. Sleep a million years. That could be their song, he and Kay.

He needed to drink something.

“Shit,” he whispered, catching himself on the walls of the hallway, legs shaking, hands shaking, his head splitting with stress and hunger and the remnants of whatever their kind had in place of adrenalin. Pushing the ruin of his shirt and jacket off of his shoulders onto a pile of things he had been meaning to throw out for a while, he wondered if he was going to have to go through the ordeal of buying new clothes.

Not bothering with the niceties of his little sherry glass, or the comfort of his couch, he all but fell onto one of the kitchen chairs, spinning the top of the thermos open so quickly it flew off and disappeared somewhere. He gulped rather than sipped, his throat painful, his body so dehydrated and hungry, the drugging, the near hysteria, and the blood loss all having their way with him. And it was nearly dawn now.

Adam’s body could feel the pressure of the sun’s rising.

It took nearly the entire thermos for him to feel well enough to be near Kay. Standing at the kitchen sink to wipe himself down and let the water warm up enough to clean her off with, Adam felt a sob climb through him. Convulsing with it, he leaned, stiff-armed on the edge of the counter trying to control himself. 

Trying to make it fucking stop.

It wouldn’t stop. 

Sliding down to the floor, Adam cried for the first time in decades, wrenching cries that seemed to pull from the soles of his feet every bit of pain and dread that had been clotted and snarled inside of him since Eve had died. 

He cried and cried and then found himself talking to Eve.

“He’s gone, baby. He’s gone and he can’t do anything to anyone any longer,” he babbled to his dead love. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” He was sorry he hadn’t saved her. He was sorry that he had let Phillipe do how much harm in the years since her death. He was sorry that Ava was most likely dead, no matter how much she deserved it. He was sorry that he had such feelings fo-

Kay touched his shoulder, and then sank down next to him. Adam fell over onto her lap, wrapped his arms about her waist, and sobbed while she stroked his hair, rocking slightly, letting him do what needed to be done. Afterward, he was exhausted, his head hurt worse than ever, and yet he felt clean. 

“We need to get both of us to bed,” Kay said, her voice a shadow of its usual crisp, efficientness. The circles under her eyes were dark as dirt and hurt to look at. At some point during his blood and tear fest she had taken off her ruined clothing, cleaned off her neck, and put on one of his old t-shirts. 

“How is your throat?” he asked, noticing that the fang marks were almost gone but the bruises were dark and covered her from shoulder to chin.

“Terrible,” she said matter of factly. Then she frowned, touching his cheek, her fingertips curiously dabbing at his tears. “Not blood?” she asked.

Even though his eyes were sore he managed a good, hard roll. “I have NEVER understood that particular bit of bullshit. When you cry do turkey sandwiches pour down your face? Do your eyes squirt that disgusting mac and cheese garbage you like? No. Because that would make no fucking sense. Let’s get to bed.”

Kay was woken by kisses. Kisses on her lips, kisses on her neck where she had thankfully healed all of the way, kisses on her shoulder. “Is it dusk?” she asked, feeling dreamy and strange. Lightheaded from the blood she had lost, but more than that. From seeing Adam so open. So broken open. In the store, and then again in his kitchen.

“Not for hours,” he said to her skin, a hand sliding up her ribs, pushing the t-shirt out of the way. “Tell me to stop. That you need to sleep. That you need food and rest and I’m a monster…”

“I do need those things,” she said, “but don’t stop. Please don’t stop. I want more. I want to feel good.”

He raised his head, and she could barely make out the gleam of his teeth and eyes and his long, naked body in the deep darkness. “I can do that.”

With tenderness, he slowly finished taking the t-shirt off, obviously worried about hurting her any more than she already was. There were bruises everywhere on her, Kay had discovered these when she took off her ruined clothing before, not just her neck, and Adam brushed each with his lips. 

There was a long, welt-like mark on her hip from where she had been thrown against Phillipe’s car, and a roundish one on the other hip from falling after he bit her. Her upper arms were both banded with fingermarks, and one of her knees was even slightly swollen. Kay sighed. She was going to be so stiff tomorrow. And the day after.

Then she sighed again as Adam tended to each place, his mouth so soft against the sensitive skin, sending quivers through her. As he made his way over her the motion of his skin on hers, cool and firm, was almost as delicious as being licked. It was no longer her being touch starved when they were together, it was her starving for his touch in particular. 

Kay had read that sufficient pleasure would temporarily eradicate pain. Kay had never felt that much pleasure, but she was ready to find out if it was true.

“I hate these,” Adam said, kissing the welt hard enough to sting, as he slid one big, lightly calloused hand between her knees and upwards. When she jumped slightly under the kiss, he nuzzled the spot and then licked it, at the same time he brushed her clit with a fingertip. 

A jolt of confused bliss jerked her hips up, and she could feel his teeth, though not his fangs, scraping over her hipbone, while he gently rubbed. Kay’s eyes fluttered closed, “Adam…?”

“Yes?”

“Can I grab your hair?”

A chuckle tickled her skin, and then he placed a kiss on her navel. “Your manners… Kay, you can do anything you want to me.”

“Oh. Thank you.” He stroked a finger deep into her, and she found herself thanking him again and again until he slid back up her body, while still gently fucking her with now two fingers, and kissed her quiet.

Adam kissed so beautifully - open, possessive, but never suffocating, letting her take him as much as he took her. He combed his free hand deep into her hair, while she held onto his mane with both of hers, one of her ankles wrapped about his calf, his long thigh trapped her hip, the hair on it teasing her. They were knotted together, and Kay found herself trying to lift her hips, to get more friction where he was rubbing and fucking her, to get more pressure as she sank further away from clear thoughts or bad feelings.

When he teased at her nipple with the tip of one fang, the pulse it sent through her blood vibrated straight down between her legs, overwhelming her and her orgasm was warm, and very wet, and sweet enough that her body felt like it was made of honey. 

“Lay down,” she gasped, as he played with her more, with those lovely fingers.

“ _ Not playing with me, _ ” Kay thought, “ _ but playing me. Making me come. Making music of us _ .”

“Will you ride me, sweetheart,” his voice was darker than the air around them, his accent ancient and rough. “Make me your steed to ride until you wear yourself out on me?”

Kay so wished she could say things like that. Think of words that would tell Adam how much she wanted him. How beautiful he was, not just his splendid face and graceful body, but him. Every prickly thought in his brain thrilled her as much as every hard inch of his prick. 

That wasn’t bad, she thought, but before she could tell him that, Adam rolled over, taking her with him so she was sprawled wet and hot and soft over his hard, cool body, her wet cunt splayed over his belly. “Christ, Kay,” he groaned, “the feel of you drenched for me. Lift my prick, put me in you. Take me deep as you can, girl.”

Sitting back on his hips, Kay rocked back and forth over him until he slipped into her. Being filled, being stretched, while Adam clawed the sheet and tossed his head as he throbbed inside of her. 

She rode hard, pushing herself, every muscle straining. Kay’s curled her toes and bore down hard on him, her palms slammed into his chest, as Adam writhed beneath her, coming undone, his stormcloud hair tossing, his body arching, his hands scrambling for purchase against back, on her breasts, finally grabbing her waist and using her to fuck himself, trying to speak and past words. 

Only the inability to speak kept Kay quiet, as inside she thought over and over, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

When one of her hands brushed his hair, on instinct his head turned and he bit into her wrist. 

They both froze. Adam in horror at what he had done. Kay in horror at what he must now know. 

Then he snarled, lifting his hips, fucking her from below hard and fast and she came, her orgasm luscious and she ground on him like she could turn his bones to powder beneath her, making it go on and on.

Adam shouted beneath her, his body heaving like an earthquake, as his own climax unravelled him.

One taste, one drop of Kay’s blood, sweet with Marid’s Blood and lust, rolled onto Adam’s tongue, filling him with her, with her pleasure and her truths. 

She loved him.

For whatever reason, by whatever miracle, or madness, Kay was in love with him … Adam thought. He tried to fight the exhaustion of the night before, of the sun, his orgasm, and the drugging effect of her blood, to speak, but there was no way. 

Clutching her to him, Adam fell back into torpor. 

When he woke at sunset she was gone. 

Above him he could hear through his soundproofing the noises of fixtures being moved and boards being hammered.

After a shower in which Adam tried not to think about anything, he pulled on an old, black shirt and a pair of trousers he wore when he was doing dirty work around his place and went up to help.

At some point Kay had gone home, cleaned up, and changed into legging and a sweatshirt. Her hair was braided, and she wore no jewelry. He had never seen her so severe or serious, even when about to be drunk dry by Phillipe. She stood by the door holding a clipboard and like the general of a small, but eager force directed several young men in putting the store back in order. 

On one of the old couches Nekhii - wearing a cashmere coat over an Italian suit that was getting badly wrinkled - was laying down, fiddling with his phone. “Ok,” he called out to Kay over the sound of broken glass being swept, “the money for the repairs has been put into your account, and I gave … someone’s credit card information to the hardware store so you can order whatever you need. Hi, Adam.”

He swung around and stood, putting out a hand, “No hard feelings.”

Adam looked the elegant man up and down, and at the conman’s smile on his handsome, dark face, “I don’t think so. Where is Kit?”

Nekhii shrugged and put his hands into his coat pockets. “Probably arranging our flight to Malta. We’re borrowing a condo there for the winter.”

“Does the owner know you’re borrowing it?”

“They’re in jail for tax fraud, so probably not. He sends his love, and hopes you’ll forgive him some day.” 

Adam resisted his massive desire to break his aristocratic nose. “Tell him to go fuck himself.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought you would say.  _ Adieu _ , anyway,” he said, giving a small salute. On his way to the door he leaned over to whisper something to Kay - who had stopped what she was doing to watch them talk - and kiss her on the cheek. “Farewell, darling, and keep it in mind. You have my number.”

And then he was gone, leaving behind the scent of Oud Silk Mood and, apparently, enough swindled money to fix Phillipe’s tantrum.

“Can I help? I’m pretty good with my hands.” Adam asked, crossing the floor to Kay, stepping around fallen books and around work being done, nervous. 

Nervous, like a fucking zombie.

Distractedly looking over his shoulder, she shook her head, “No, I think we’re good. It should only take two days, or so their manager says.”

Damn. “Then maybe we could-”

Before he could finish saying whatever he was going to say, Kay shook her head, “No. No, no.” For a second he was taken aback until he realized she was talking to one of the workers, “Sorry, Adam, I have to make sure they don’t start fixing things that Earl prefers to have broken.”

“I just-” he slicked his hand though his hair, “are you. Are you ok? I mean, you’ve been through a lot.”

She gave him a very clumsy eye roll behind her glasses, “I think I’m too busy to be anything but ok. After this is all over I plan to have a nice little hysterical attack. Maybe some bad dreams. But right now I have -” she notice something that made her go pale. “No! Don’t touch that hole! There is probably a cat in it!”

After watching her for a few moments, having a hard time making himself stop looking at her, Adam slunk back to his lair, like a good monster.

_ “Oh, my darling. You are so very bad at this,” Eve said. _

_ They walked together in the night garden they had been remarried in, hand in hand, dressed in their wedding best. “Was I as bad with you?” he asked. “I don’t remember being.” _

_ She was so beautiful. A fairy queen spun of moonlight and desires. And she laughed at him. “Dreadful, my love, utterly dreadful. But then you played me a piece of music and -” she touched his cheek, “you were more eloquent than Marlowe.” _

_ “Shakespeare,” he corrected her, taking her hand to kiss her palm. _

_ “Shakespeare,” she agreed. _

_ “Is this goodbye?” he asked, his heart sad but no longer shattered. _

_ “Perhaps. Or perhaps, au revoir. Either way, be good to her, be good to you, and remember how much I loved you, and love you still, my liege lord.” _

_ “I love you, too, Eve, and always shall,” Adam said to the air, for she was gone. _

Kay had avoided Adam as long as she could without being rude. Since he had asked her to come and listen to a new piece he was working on it would have been exceptionally rude, which she was incapable of.

Now she fidgeted, looking again around the store, tapping the toes of her new, patent leather moccasins, straightening her tweed skirt for the nine hundredth time and buttoning and unbuttoning the top collar of her pink silk blouse. Today the bruises on her neck were finally completely gone so it was the first time she had gone without a turtleneck all week and it left her feeling uncomfortably naked. 

At last she petted Cobweb who was sleeping on the new counter, clearly happy to have his favorite spot back and squared her shoulders. She could do this. She could face him and not die of embarrassment.

_ “It must be nice to be able to be rude _ ,” she thought to herself as she let herself into his lair after closing the store. The first day back open had been busy, and she was worn out from recommending books and deflecting questions from the customers and staff. The workers had done an excellent job on the store, but it wasn’t  _ exactly  _ the same.

The regulars noticed, and frowned. 

Genie had frowned at her incessantly, and Bianca had asked over and over if Earl knew the store had been closed. Marco and Robbie were both just happy to have had time off with pay, and she thanked god for their stoner disinterest.

At last she made her way down.

“Knock knock,” she said before turning the little corner of the stairwell, hating herself for saying it. For being cute. 

For being pitifully in love with someone who was in love with someone else.

“You’re already in,” Adam called out. 

It had been a few days since she had heard his voice, and it’s deep, irritated tone gave her a thrill that she beat down very, very hard. 

He wasn’t in what was called the living room, but in the alcove-ish space where he kept his recording equipment and any instruments he wasn’t currently using. Barefoot, in a velvet shirt with dust on it, and old, drainpipe jeans, Adam looked more disheveled and more entrancing than she had ever seen him.

Don’t sigh, she ordered herself, it’s bad enough he knows how you feel, you don’t have to make a cake of yourself. Or a bigger cake, anyway.

“Take a seat,” he said, not looking up from where he was messing with some of his equipment. 

Kay smoothed her skirt under her as she perched on the edge of what might have been a loveseat under the stacks of papers, magazines, and books. He watched blank-faced until she was settled, “I’m going to record this, so don’t make any noise.” he ordered, then added, “Please.”

She started to say something, caught his look, then nodded and made a zipping and throwing away the key motion over her lips which earned her an eyeroll. The first in what seemed like forever, so it gave Kay a bit of a thrill.  _ “What kind of person gets turned on by an expression of exasperation _ ?” she asked herself.

He turned on one of his numerous, ancient reel-to-reel recorders, which made a low, electric hum, and then a second one, which played a kind of mesmerizing loop - droning, dark, played on an instrument she didn’t know enough to recognize, with a soft yet insistent beat that seemed to be coming from behind it. The kind of music Adam made that Kay didn’t understand but would find herself swaying softly to, a little embarrassed because she was certain he would scoff at it making her want to dance.

The hiss of the tape seemed to be part of the music.

_ “How clever,” _ she thought, delighted. But then, Adam was apparently a genius. 

Nodding to himself along with that secret beat, Adam picked up his guitar and began to play. It was quiet at first, just another layer of what was already being played, but then slowly it grew louder. It peeled away from the background track and turned into something that was standing in front of it, something that seemed to be pointing at it rather than being a part of it. 

Adam’s head was back, his eyes almost closed, and he played as if he had put himself into a trance,  _ “The hypnotist hypnotises himself,” _ she thought. 

Kay forced herself not to look at that transported, naked look on his face, knowing that if she did she would forget about the music entirely and if Adam wanted her to listen to something he wrote then she was going to listen.

Closing her own eyes, she could still see Adam. Because she could hear him in the music. Hear his gloom in that sonorous background, hear his prickly temper in the distortion he intentionally created on the guitar, hear the sound that was the heartbeat he no longer had in that rhythm, hear the sweetness he couldn’t hide all of the time in the delicacy of his fingers on the strings. 

Slowly the guitar smoothed back, once again reuniting with the background music, then fading out, then the background played alone, and finally resolved into the hiss of the tape.

Shaking his head as if to wake himself, Adam turned off both recorders.

Kay looked at him. She was dazed. It was like she had been inside of his deepest self. As if she had experienced just an inkling of what he talked about when he drank someone’s blood. For a few seconds she had to fight to crawl back to herself, and was glad to find she was still there. Adam would be so very easy to be lost in.

He looked back at her, wary.

“May I applaud?”

He smiled, lowering and shaking his head. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

A little disappointed she nodded, lowering the hands she had already raised and instead started to stand up but he shook at hand at her. “Wait, I want to play it back. Can you-” he stopped himself and then met her eyes, looking as if what he was about to say was very important. “Will you wait until I do?”

“Um, sure,” feeling a little confused, Kay sat down again.

Adam wound back the reel to reel that had made the recording and then hit play. The music came out again, this time from different speakers, and a bit louder. He stood, head down so his mane hid his face, heels of both of his hands pressed into the small of his back, and nodded along. Halfway through he straightened up, his hair falling back, and gave her a smile-

A smile like Kay had never seen on his face. Utterly pleased, content.

Happy, even.

“It’s different,” he said. He clapped his hands once, his big palms loud as cymbals. “I fucking knew it would be. It’s different now.”

“Different than what?” she asked.

Turning the recording off, he asked, “Do you know what the observer effect is?” Then, before she could say ‘yes’, he went on, “It’s the theory in physics that the mere observation of a phenomenon inevitably changes that phenomenon.”

Grabbing a kitchen chair he put it down in front of Kay so they were less than a hand’s reach apart. His knees wide, he let those hands dangle as he leaned forward, for once seeming to be eager to talk. “I have had an idea for a long time now that it can be applied to hearing as well. I mean, I know music is subjective, art is always subjective, but I also knew...“ Struggling for a second he stopped and looked away from her.

Before Kay could decide if he was embarrassed or uncertain he met her eye. For a few of her breaths they started at each other. Somehow, she knew that whatever he was struggling to say she would understand.

Adam pushed his hands through his hair, and then went on, his voice stronger, “I always knew that when I played a piece for Eve first, before anyone else, it would transform, become different in a way that no one would ever know about and that I could never express. Better, somehow. I didn’t play everything for her first, if I wrote a piece for someone else I would play it for them, and that would affect it as well. But the music I wrote for myself. The pieces I needed to get out there, to have be heard, I always played to her first, because she was the reason every piece was born. It … finished them in some way. And when I started writing this I knew it needed something.”

Kay had inched backwards until she was as far from him as she could get without leaving, her back pressed to old newspapers that were no doubt getting ink on her blouse. Just not wanting to hear anymore about Eve for just a little while. And feeling terrible about it. That he felt he could speak to her about his beloved wife was a privilege, she knew that. It just wasn’t one that she wanted at the moment. 

Not noticing, he went on. “It needed you. It needed to be changed in the way that only you could, and that only I would ever know about. It needed to be something that was…” again he seemed to be having trouble. 

Adam never had trouble expressing any of his many thoughts and opinions.

“...it needed be something that was touched by you, because I wrote it for you. I wrote it because of you. About you or rather, about what you do to me. About what you are to me.”

Kay felt a weird, glowing hollow in her chest, “I don’t understand your music. You know that. So you have to tell me. In words please. Those I am good with.”

She waited for him to laugh.

Instead, he took her hands, which were shaking, into his own which were not too steady either, and laced their fingers, “I love you, Kay.”

That was all. No protestations. No explanations. No talking about Eve or how he felt differently about them because they were different. That his love for her was different.

Just “I love you, Kay.”

“Thank you.”

“What?” he snorted and pulled back a little.

“Thank you. For the music. I love you, too. But you knew that. I know you knew. You would know. You drank my blood that time and I was so in love with you and scared and all I could think was it wouldn’t be so bad of a way to die, in your arms. Which was stupid, of course. But, you know, blood loss, and how would you feel? So I know you-” 

Words, all of them a tangle and wrong, fought for her, trying to make her say them. She pushed them away and said, “Would you play me something else?”

“Maybe later,” he said, wrapping his long arms about her, holding her head against his still chest.

“Do you have other plans?” she asked his shirt, wanting to hide inside of it.

She felt him shake with laughter, “Yes.”

Then, like the first time they met, he leaned down, tossed her over his shoulder, and carried her away.

The sound of keys in a lock woke Adam from a sound and well-earned rest. There were a few footsteps, and then the thud of a bag filled with books hitting the wooden floor.

“What the fuck happened to my goddamned store?” 

There was the sound of stomping feet, “Where is my goddamned cat?”

Then the smell of coffee being made and, because it was Sunday morning, Purcell’s  _ O Solitude _ wafted downward from the new, nicer sound system that Adam had snuck into the store’s rehab plans. 

“Earl’s back,” he whispered too softly to wake Kay, who he then pulled closer to him, burying his nose in her hair, closing his eyes, sighing, and smiling. 

Smiling, he had discovered recently, felt pretty fucking good.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for joining me, Adam, and Kay in the bookstore. There are more stories from Flitcraft's basement to come.

**Author's Note:**

> O Solitude - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2lsjqusfQY
> 
> Readers of my other stories MIGHT recognize the name of the book store Kay works at.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Bookcase](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27567274) by [dianamolloy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dianamolloy/pseuds/dianamolloy)




End file.
